Hudde, Johannes (1628-1704)

Hudde was born into a leading Amsterdam family, which co-founded the Dutch East India Company. During his study at Leiden he encountered the mathematician Frans van Schooten who produced a translation of Descartes’s La Géométrie with commentaries by his students, including Hudde, Christiaan Huygens, Johan de Witt, and Hendrik van Heuraet. Hudde’s work contributed to the development of calculus and later he did important, more applied work on the mathematics of annuities. He also wrote on optics and was interested in developing lenses for microscopes and telescopes. He was much involved in what we would now call civil engineering and water management projects in Amsterdam and Holland, and sponsored Huygens’s work on clocks to find longitude at sea. During the last decades of his life he was a leading director of the Dutch East India Company, a mayor of Amsterdam, and key ally of William III (of William and Mary fame) in Dutch political life.