The Treatise on Quadrature of Fermat (c. 1659), besides containing the first known proof of the computation of the area under a higher parabola, ∫ x dx, or under a higher hyperbola, ∫ x dx— with the appropriate limits of integration in each case—, has a second part which was not understood by Fermat’s contemporaries. This second part of the Treatise is obscure and difficult to read and even the...
