Simon Stevin through the lens of his dedications

Abstract

The article studies the dedicatory letters the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin (1548–1620) included in his works. Dedicatory letters gave authors the opportunity to create a persona or scholarly identity for themselves and thereby also to define their field, at a time when these were still in full flux. Stevin, in his dedications, ignored or even mocked the common rhetoric of patronage. He deliberately did not present himself as an academic scholar or as a court mathematician (even after he entered the service of Maurits of Nassau, the stadholder of Holland). His scholarship appears subsumed under a wider category of active citizenship that was peculiar to the emerging Dutch Republic. The difficulty modern scholars have in pinning down Stevin's work in modern categories therefore appears to have its origin in Stevin's own understanding of scholarship, which did not create a tradition and was quickly forgotten.