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Grégoire de Saint-Vincent, a Jesuit, born at Bruges in 1584 and died at Ghent in 1667, discovered the expansion of log(1 + x) in ascending powers of x. Although a circle-squarer he is worthy of mention for the numerous theorems of interest which he discovered in his search after the impossible, and Montucla ingeniously remarks that ``no one ever squared the circle with so much ability or (except for his principal object) with so much success.'' He wrote two books on the subject, one published in 1647 and the other in 1668, which cover some two or three thousand closely printed pages; the fallacy in the quadrature was pointed out by Huygens. In the former work he used indivisibles. An earlier work entitled Theoremata Mathematica, published in 1624, contains a clear account of the method of exhaustions, which is applied to several quadratures, notably that of the hyperbola.
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