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Person

Bonaventura Cavalieri

A portrait depicts a man wearing a black beret, a white ruffled collar, and a dark robe adorned with a gold medallion, symbolizing his historical significance in mathematics and academia.

Italian Jesuat priest and mathematician (1598–1647), professor at Bologna, who developed the method of indivisibles — a technique for computing areas and volumes by treating them as sums of lower-dimensional slices. The method was a direct precursor to integral calculus and was attacked at length by Jesuit mathematicians who considered it metaphysically incoherent. Cavalieri was Torricelli's teacher and lifelong correspondent.

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