Morris Kline

"As for negative numbers... most mathematicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not accept them... In the fifteenth century and, in the sixteenth, Stifel both spoke of negative numbers a…"

"By 1700 all of the familiar members of the system... were known. However, opposition to the newer types of numbers was expressed throughout the century. Typical are the objections of... Baron Francis …"

"The chief innovator of symbolism in algebra was François Viète... an amateur in the sense that his professional life was devoted to the law... John Wallis... says that Viète, in denoting a class of nu…"

"The use of canon raised numerous questions concerning the paths of projectiles. ...One might determine... what type of curve a projectile follows and.... prove some geometrical facts about this curve,…"

"While the mathematicians were still looking askance at the Greek gift of the irrational number, the Hindus of India were preparing another brain-teaser, the negative number, which they introduced abou…"

"Fermat applied his method of tangents to many difficult problems. The method has the form of the now-standard method of differential calculus, though it begs entirely the difficult theory of limits."

"Though Wallis was advanced for his times and accepted negative numbers, he thought they were larger than infinity but not less than zero. In his Arithmetica Infinitorum , he argued that since the rati…"

"Aristotle had considered the question of whether space is infinite and gave six nonmathematical arguments to prove that it is finite; he foresaw that this question would be troublesome."