The article studies the dedicatory letters the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin (1548–1620) included in his works. Dedicatory letters gave authors the opportunity to create a persona or scholarly identity for themselves and thereby also to define their field, at a time when these were still in full flux. Stevin, in his dedications, ignored or even mocked the common rhetoric of patronage. He deliberately did not present himself as an academic scholar or as a court mathematician (even after he entered the service of Maurits of Nassau, the stadholder of Holland). His scholarship appears subsumed under a wider category of active citizenship that was peculiar to the emerging Dutch Republic. The difficulty modern scholars have in pinning down Stevin's work in modern categories therefore appears to have its origin in Stevin's own understanding of scholarship, which did not create a tradition and was quickly forgotten.

中文翻译：

---

西蒙·史蒂文 (Simon Stevin) 的奉献精神

这篇文章研究了荷兰数学家西蒙·史蒂文 (Simon Stevin, 1548-1620) 作品中收录的献词。奉献信使作者有机会为自己创造一个人格或学术身份，从而也定义了他们的领域，在这些仍然处于完全变化的时期。史蒂文 (Stevin) 在他的奉献中忽略了甚至嘲笑了赞助的常见言辞。他刻意不以学术学者或宫廷数学家的身份出现（即使在他为荷兰的领主拿骚的莫里特服务之后）。他的奖学金似乎被归入了新兴的荷兰共和国所特有的更广泛的积极公民类别。现代学者很难将史蒂文的作品归入现代范畴，因此似乎起源于史蒂文