Florimond de Beaune (7 October 1601, Blois – 18 August 1652, Blois) was a French jurist[1] and mathematician, and an early follower of René Descartes.
[2] R. Taton calls him "a typical example of the erudite amateurs" active in 17th-century science.
[1] In a 1638 letter to Descartes, de Beaune posed the problem of solving the differential equation now seen as the first example of the inverse tangent method of deducing properties of a curve from its tangents.
[3][4] His Tractatus de limitibus aequationum was reprinted in England in 1807;[5] in it, he finds upper and lower bounds for the solutions to quadratic equations and cubic equations, as simple functions of the coefficients of these equations.
[1] Another of his writings was Notae breves, the introduction to a 1649 edition of Descartes' La Géométrie.