Mathematicians ahead of their time? It is said that in every field there’s that person who was years ahead of their time. For instance, Paul Morphy (born 1837) is said to have retired from chess because he found no one to match his technique that very much resembled modern chess theory.
So, who was the Paul Morphy of mathematics?

Girard Desargues more or less invented projective geometry in the 17th century, but nobody else paid significant attention to the topic until the 19th century.  You might say he was both ahead of and behind his time, since he developed his geometry in a classical style (without any interpretation using numeric coordinates) at just about the time Cartesian coordinates were coming into vogue.
