Eric Temple Bell on Girard Desargues

“Desargues the architect was doubtless influenced by what in his day was surrealism. In any event, he composed more like an artist than a geometer, inventing the most outrageous technical jargon in mathematics for the enlightenment of himself and the mystification of his disciples. Fortunately Desarguesian has long been a dead language.”

“After his own fashion, Desargues discussed cross ratio; poles and polars; Kepler's principle (1604) of continuity, in which a straight line is closed at infinity and parallels meet there; involutons; assymptotes at tangents at infinity; his famous theorem on triangles in perspective; and some of the projective properties of quadrilaterals inscribed in conics. Descartes greatly admired Desargue's invention, but happily for the future of geometry did not hesitate on that account to advocate for his own.”