Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes' letters (1650-1665) (Q990269)

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia considered herself a disciple of Descartes and led the way in the study of his work, especially at the University of Heidelberg, which was reestablished after the end of the Thirty Years' War and where her brother was the Elector. The author first sketches the activity of a few scholars (Joachim Jungius, Johann Hottinger, Johannes Freinsheim, and Johann von Leuneschlos) who were prominent in the intellectual ferment of the middle of the 17\(^{th}\) century in Europe. Then he passes on to the main topic of this paper, the correspondence between Descartes and Elizabeth. Some of Descartes' letters to Elizabeth were known and have been published, but Elizabeth's letters to Descartes are only known from a manuscript (containing twenty-six of them) in the library of Rosendael castle near Arnhem. They were originally found among Descartes' papers after his death by Pierre Chanut, the French ambassador to Sweden. However, Elizabeth refused Chanut's request to publish them. It is not known how they eventually reached Rosendael castle. At least two of Descartes' letters to Elizabeth are concerned with the classical problem of Apollonius, which calls for the construction of a circle that is tangent to three given circles. Descartes solved the problem and sent his solution in one of his letters to Elizabeth. She, in turn, found her own solution, which she communicated to Descartes, who praised her solution as somewhat superior to his. Much later on, she entered into a correspondence in 1665 with the accomplished English mathematician John Pell, by way of intermediaries Theodore Haak and Henry More. In spite of Elizabeth's possibly hazy recollection of her 1643 proof twenty-two years earlier, Pell was able to reconstruct her solution. [For further clarification, see the paper ``Descartes, Elizabeth and Apollonius' Problem'' by \textit{H. Bos} on pages 202-211 in the book \textit{T. Verbeek (ed.), E.-J. Bos, (ed.)} and \textit{J. van de Ven (ed.)}, ``The Correspondence of Descartes'', Zeno Institute, Utrecht (2003)]. The present paper contains a very brief letter (in French), published here for the first time, from Elizabeth to Haak concerning the solutions by Descartes and herself, together with an English translation. The author has added two pages of useful references.