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Guillaume de l'Hôpital ○̉｜Definition｜1st｜20260603225127-00-⌔
Guillaume de l’Hôpital - Wikipedia
Guillaume de l’Hôpital
Guillaume François Antoine, Marquis de l’Hôpital1 (French: [ɡijom fʁɑ̃swa ɑ̃twan maʁki də lopital]; 7 June 1661 – 2 February 1704)2 was a French mathematician. His name is firmly associated with l’Hôpital’s rule for calculating limits involving indeterminate forms 0/0 and ∞/∞. Although the rule did not originate with l’Hôpital, it appeared in print for the first time in his 1696 treatise on the infinitesimal calculus, entitled Analyse des Infiniment Petits pour l’Intelligence des Lignes Courbes.3 This book was a first systematic exposition of differential calculus. Several editions and translations to other languages were published and it became a model for subsequent treatments of calculus.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the name was commonly spelled “l’Hospital”, and he himself spelled his name that way. However, French spellings have been altered: the silent ‘s’ has been removed and replaced with the circumflex over the preceding vowel. ↩
also known as Guillaume-François-Antoine Marquis de l’Hôpital, Marquis de Sainte-Mesme, Comte d’Entremont, and Seigneur d’Ouques-la-Chaise, ↩
Answering l’Hôpital’s question, in a letter of 22 July 1694 Johann Bernoulli described the rule of computing the limit of a fraction whose numerator and denominator tend to 0 by differentiating the numerator and denominator. A commonly made claim that l’Hôpital attempted to get credit for discovering the l’Hôpital’s rule is inaccurate, since in the preface to his textbook, l’Hôpital generally acknowledged Leibniz, Jakob Bernoulli and Johann Bernoulli as the sources of the results in it. ↩
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