Simon Stevin
Flemish mathematician, physicist and engineer (1548-1620) · Academics · Died at 72
Simon Stevin is read about 186 times a day, in 45 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 September 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A Flemish polymath who didn't just advance mathematics and engineering - he rewired the language itself, coining wiskunde ("knowledge of what is certain") so the Dutch could speak of math without borrowing from Greek.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 8
In their own words 6
, The second Definition. Number is that which expresseth the quantitie of each thing.
The sixt Definition. A Whole number is either a unitie, or a compounded multitude of unities.
The seventh Definition. The Golden Rule, or Rule of three, is that by which to three tearmes given, the fourth proportionall tearme is found.
In their orbit
About this person
Simon Stevin was born in 1548 in Flanders and spent his life straddling theory and practice, contributing to mathematics, science, engineering, and music theory in ways both abstract and applied. What set him apart wasn't only the breadth of his work but his conviction that his own language deserved precision: he translated mathematical terms into Dutch and invented wiskunde as a calque for mathematics, making Dutch one of the few European tongues to avoid the Greek loan. He did the same for chemistry, replacing chemie with scheikunde - "the art of separating" - built in analogy with his earlier coinage. He died in 1620, leaving behind not just theorems but a vocabulary that made science feel native.
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