| The Encyclopedia of World History. 2001. |
| |
| |
| 1688 |
| | | Francesco Redi (1621–97) challenged the ancient belief in spontaneous generation and began a two-century-long debate on the subject by his controlled experimentation on the production of maggots. | 1 |
| | | 1690 |
| | | Christiaan Huygens developed in his Traité de la lumière a mechanistic theory that presents light as a propagation of impulses in a subtle ether. He used this theory to explain reflection, refraction, and double refraction. | 2 |
| | | 1696 |
| | | Guillaume de L'Hôpital (1661–1704) published the first textbook of the infinitesimal calculus, Analyse des infiniment petits, based on the lectures of his teacher, Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748). | 3 |
| | | 1697 |
| | | Bernoulli showed that the curve of quickest descent is the cycloid, thereby solving the first problem of the calculus of variations. (See Science and Technology) (See Intellectual Developments) | 4 |
| |
| |
| |
| The Encyclopedia of World History, Sixth
edition. Peter N. Stearns, general editor. Copyright © 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Maps by Mary Reilly, copyright © 2001 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
|
|
