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Bernoulli, Jacques or Jakob 1654-1705
Swiss mathematician

He was born in Basle, the brother of Jean Bernoulli. He studied theology and travelled in Europe before returning to Basle (1682), where he became professor in 1687. He investigated infinite series, the cycloid, transcendental curves, logarithmic spiral and the catenary. In 1690 he applied Gottfried Leibniz's newly discovered differential calculus to a problem in geometry, and introduced the term 'integral'. His Ars conjectandi (1713), an important contribution to probability theory, included his 'law of large numbers', his permutation theory and the 'Bernoulli numbers', coefficients found in exponential series.