ISLAMIC MATHEMATICS separate the algebra from the geometry, and a purely algebraic method for the solution of

cubic equations had to wait another 500 years and the Italian mathematicians del Ferro
The Islamic Empire established across Persia, the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, Iberia
and parts of India from the 8th Century onwards made significant contributions towards
mathematics. They were able to draw on and fuse together the mathematical developments
of both Greece and India.
One consequence of the Islamic prohibition on depicting the human form was the extensive
use of complex geometric patterns to decorate their buildings, raising mathematics to the
form of an art. In fact, over time, Muslim artists discovered all the different forms of symmetry
that can be depicted on a 2-dimensional surface.
The Quran itself encouraged the accumulation of knowledge, and a Golden Age of Islamic
science and mathematics flourished throughout the medieval period from the 9th to 15th
Centuries. The House of Wisdom was set up in Baghdad around 810, and work started almost
immediately on translating the major Greek and Indian mathematical and astronomy works
into Arabic.
The outstanding Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi was an early Director of the
House of Wisdom in the 9th Century, and one of the greatest of early Muslim mathematicians.
Perhaps Al-Khwarizmis most important contribution to mathematics was his strong advocacy
of the Hindu numerical system (1 - 9 and 0), which he recognized as having the power and
efficiency needed to revolutionize Islamic (and, later, Western) mathematics, and which was
soon adopted by the entire Islamic world, and later by Europe as well.
Al-Khwarizmi's other important contribution was algebra, and he introduced the fundamental
algebraic methods of reduction and balancing and provided an exhaustive account of
solving polynomial equations up to the second degree. In this way, he helped create the
powerful abstract mathematical language still used across the world today, and allowed a
much more general way of analyzing problems other than just the specific problems
previously considered by the Indians and Chinese.
The 10th Century Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Karaji worked to extend algebra still
further, freeing it from its geometrical heritage, and introduced the theory of algebraic
calculus. Al-Karaji was the first to use the method of proof by mathematical induction to prove
his results, by proving that the first statement in an infinite sequence of statements is true,
and then proving that, if any one statement in the sequence is true, then so is the next one.
and Tartaglia.
The 13th Century Persian astronomer, scientist and mathematician Nasir Al-Din Al-Tusi was
perhaps the first to treat trigonometry as a separate mathematical discipline, distinct from
astronomy. Building on earlier work by Greek mathematicians such as Menelaus of Alexandria
and Indian work on the sine function, he gave the first extensive exposition of spherical
trigonometry, including listing the six distinct cases of a right triangle in spherical
trigonometry. One of his major mathematical contributions was the formulation of the famous
law of sines for plane triangles, a(sin A) = b(sinB) = c(sin C), although the sine law for spherical
triangles had been discovered earlier by the 10th Century Persians Abul Wafa Buzjani and Abu
Nasr Mansur.
Other medieval Muslim mathematicians worthy of note include:
the 9th Century Arab Thabit ibn Qurra, who developed a general formula by which
amicable numbers could be derived, re-discovered much later by
both Fermat and Descartes(amicable numbers are pairs of numbers for which the sum of the
divisors of one number equals the other number, e.g. the proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5,
10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110, of which the sum is 284; and the proper divisors of 284 are 1,
2, 4, 71, and 142, of which the sum is 220);
the 10th Century Arab mathematician Abul Hasan al-Uqlidisi, who wrote the earliest
surviving text showing the positional use of Arabic numerals, and particularly the use of
decimals instead of fractions (e.g. 7.375 insead of 738);
the 10th Century Arab geometer Ibrahim ibn Sinan, who continued Archimedes'
investigations of areas and volumes, as well as on tangents of a circle;
the 11th Century Persian Ibn al-Haytham (also known as Alhazen), who, in addition to his
groundbreaking work on optics and physics, established the beginnings of the link between
algebra and geometry, and devised what is now known as "Alhazen's problem" (he was the
first mathematician to derive the formula for the sum of the fourth powers, using a method
that is readily generalizable); and
the 13th Century Persian Kamal al-Din al-Farisi, who applied the theory of conic sections to
solve optical problems, as well as pursuing work in number theory such as on amicable
numbers, factorization and combinatorial methods;
the 13th Century Moroccan Ibn al-Banna al-Marrakushi, whose works included topics such
as computing square roots and the theory of continued fractions, as well as the discovery of
the first new pair of amicable numbers since ancient times (17,296 and 18,416, later re-
discovered by Fermat) and the the first use of algebraic notation since Brahmagupta.

Among other things, Al-Karaji used mathematical induction to prove the binomial theorem. A
With the stifling influence of the Turkish Ottoman Empire from the 14th or 15th Century
binomial is a simple type of algebraic expression which has just two terms which are operated
onwards, Islamic mathematics stagnated, and further developments moved to Europe.
on only by addition, subtraction, multiplication and positive whole-number exponents, such as
(x +y)2. The co-efficients needed when a binomial is expanded form a symmetrical triangle,
usually referred to as Pascals Triangle after the 17th Century French mathematician Blaise ISLAMIC MATHEMATICS - AL-KHWARIZMI
Pascal, although many other mathematicians had studied it centuries before him in India,
Persia, China and Italy, including Al-Karaji.
One of the first Directors of the House of Wisdom in Bagdad in the early 9th Century was an
outstanding Persian mathematician called Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi. He oversaw the
Some hundred years after Al-Karaji, Omar Khayyam (perhaps better known as a poet and the translation of the major Greek and Indian mathematical and astronomy works (including those
writer of the Rubaiyat, but an important mathematician and astronomer in his own right) of Brahmagupta) into Arabic, and produced original work which had a lasting influence on the
generalized Indian methods for extracting square and cube roots to include fourth, fifth and advance of Muslim and (after his works spread to Europe through Latin translations in the 12th
higher roots in the early 12th Century. He carried out a systematic analysis of cubic problems, Century) later European mathematics.
revealing there were actually several different sorts of cubic equations. Although he did in fact
succeed in solving cubic equations, and although he is usually credited with identifying the
foundations of algebraic geometry, he was held back from further advances by his inability to
The word algorithm is derived from the Latinization of his name, and the word "algebra" is
derived from the Latinization of "al-jabr", part of the title of his most famous book, in which he
introduced the fundamental algebraic methods and techniques for solving equations.
Perhaps his most important contribution to mathematics was his strong advocacy of the Hindu
numerical system, which Al-Khwarizmi recognized as having the power and efficiency needed
to revolutionize Islamic and Western mathematics. The Hindu numerals 1 - 9 and 0 - which
have since become known as Hindu-Arabic numerals - were soon adopted by the entire Islamic
world. Later, with translations of Al-Khwarizmis work into Latin by Adelard of Bath and others
in the 12th Century, and with the influence of Fibonaccis Liber Abaci they would be adopted
throughout Europe as well.
Al-Khwarizmis other important contribution was algebra, a word derived from the title of a
mathematical text he published in about 830 called Al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l-
muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing). Al-
Khwarizmi wanted to go from the specific problems considered by the Indians and Chinese to
a more general way of analyzing problems, and in doing so he created an abstract
mathematical language which is used across the world today.
His book is considered the foundational text of modern algebra, although he did not employ
the kind of algebraic notation used today (he used words to explain the problem, and
diagrams to solve it). But the book provided an exhaustive account of solving polynomial
equations up to the second degree, and introduced for the first time the fundamental
algebraic methods of reduction (rewriting an expression in a simpler form), completion
(moving a negative quantity from one side of the equation to the other side and changing its
sign) and balancing (subtraction of the same quantity from both sides of an equation, and
the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides).
In particular, Al-Khwarizmi developed a formula for systematically solving quadratic equations
(equations involving unknown numbers to the power of 2, or x2) by using the methods of
completion and balancing to reduce any equation to one of six standard forms, which were
then solvable. He described the standard forms in terms of "squares" (what would today be
"x2"), "roots" (what would today be "x") and "numbers" (regular constants, like 42), and
identified the six types as: squares equal roots (ax2 = bx), squares equal number (ax2= c),
roots equal number (bx = c), squares and roots equal number (ax2 + bx = c), squares and
number equal roots (ax2 + c = bx), and roots and number equal squares (bx + c = ax2).
subjects in metaphysics and theology, such as "How many angels can stand on the point of a
needle?"
From the 4th to 12th Centuries, European knowledge and study of arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music was limited mainly to Boethius translations of some of the works of
ancient Greek masters such as Nicomachus and Euclid. All trade and calculation was made
using the clumsy and inefficient Roman numeral system, and with an abacus based
on Greek and Roman models.
By the 12th Century, though, Europe, and particularly Italy, was beginning to trade with the
East, and Eastern knowledge gradually began to spread to the West. Robert of Chester
translated Al-Khwarizmi's important book on algebra into Latin in the 12th Century, and the
complete text of Euclid's Elements was translated in various versions by Adelard of Bath,
Herman of Carinthia and Gerard of Cremona. The great expansion of trade and commerce in
general created a growing practical need for mathematics, and arithmetic entered much more
into the lives of common people and was no longer limited to the academic realm.
The advent of the printing press in the mid-15th Century also had a huge impact. Numerous
books on arithmetic were published for the purpose of teaching business people
computational methods for their commercial needs and mathematics gradually began to
acquire a more important position in education.
Europes first great medieval mathematician was the Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better known by
his nickname Fibonacci. Although best known for the so-called Fibonacci Sequence of
numbers, perhaps his most important contribution to European mathematics was his role in
spreading the use of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system throughout Europe early in the 13th
Century, which soon made the Roman numeral system obsolete, and opened the way for great
advances in European mathematics.
An important (but largely unknown and underrated) mathematician and scholar of the 14th
Century was the Frenchman Nicole Oresme. He used a system of rectangular coordinates
centuries before his countryman Ren Descartes popularized the idea, as well as perhaps the
first time-speed-distance graph. Also, leading from his research into musicology, he was the
first to use fractional exponents, and also worked on infinite series, being the first to prove
that the harmonic series 11 + 12+ 13 + 14 + 15... is a divergent infinite series (i.e. not tending to
a limit, other than infinity).

Al-Khwarizmi is usually credited with the development of lattice (or sieve) multiplication
The German scholar Regiomontatus was perhaps the most capable mathematician of the 15th
method of multiplying large numbers, a method algorithmically equivalent to long
Century, his main contribution to mathematics being in the area of trigonometry. He helped
multiplication. His lattice method was later introduced into Europe by Fibonacci.
separate trigonometry from astronomy, and it was largely through his efforts that
trigonometry came to be considered an independent branch of mathematics. His book "De
In addition to his work in mathematics, Al-Khwarizmi made important contributions to Triangulis", in which he described much of the basic trigonometric knowledge which is now
astronomy, also largely based on methods from India, and he developed the first quadrant (an taught in high school and college, was the first great book on trigonometry to appear in print.
instrument used to determine time by observations of the Sun or stars), the second most
widely used astronomical instrument during the Middle Ages after the astrolabe. He also
Mention should also be made of Nicholas of Cusa (or Nicolaus Cusanus), a 15th Century
produced a revised and completed version of Ptolemy's Geography, consisting of a list of
German philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, whose prescient ideas on the infinite
2,402 coordinates of cities throughout the known world.
and the infinitesimal directly influenced later mathematicians like Gottfried Leibniz and Georg
Cantor. He also held some distinctly non-standard intuitive ideas about the universe and the
MEDIEVAL MATHEMATICS Earth's position in it, and about the elliptical orbits of the planets and relative motion, which
foreshadowed the later discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler.
During the centuries in which the Chinese, Indian and Islamic mathematicians had been in the
ascendancy, Europe had fallen into the Dark Ages, in which science, mathematics and almost MEDIEVAL MATHEMATICS - FIBONACCI
all intellectual endeavour stagnated. Scholastic scholars only valued studies in the humanities,
such as philosophy and literature, and spent much of their energies quarrelling over subtle
The 13th Century Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better known by his nickname Fibonacci, was
perhaps the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages. Little is known of his
life except that he was the son of a customs offical and, as a child, he travelled around North
Africa with his father, where he learned about Arabic mathematics. On his return to Italy, he
helped to disseminate this knowledge throughout Europe, thus setting in motion a
rejuvenation in European mathematics, which had lain largely dormant for centuries during
the Dark Ages.
In particular, in 1202, he wrote a hugely influential book called Liber Abaci ("Book of
Calculation"), in which he promoted the use of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, describing
its many benefits for merchants and mathematicians alike over the clumsy system
of Roman numerals then in use in Europe. Despite its obvious advantages, uptake of the
system in Europe was slow (this was after all during the time of the Crusades against Islam, a
time in which anything Arabic was viewed with great suspicion), and Arabic numerals were
even banned in the city of Florence in 1299 on the pretext that they were easier to falsify
than Roman numerals. However, common sense eventually prevailed and the new system was
adopted throughout Europe by the 15th century, making the Roman system obsolete. The
horizontal bar notation for fractions was also first used in this work (although following
the Arabic practice of placing the fraction to the left of the integer).
Fibonacci is best known, though, for his introduction into Europe of a particular number
sequence, which has since become known as Fibonacci Numbers or the Fibonacci Sequence.
He discovered the sequence - the first recursive number sequence known in Europe - while
considering a practical problem in the Liber Abaci involving the growth of a hypothetical
population of rabbits based on idealized assumptions. He noted that, after each monthly
generation, the number of pairs of rabbits increased from 1 to 2 to 3 to 5 to 8 to 13, etc, and
identified how the sequence progressed by adding the previous two terms (in mathematical
terms, Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2), a sequence which could in theory extend indefinitely.
The sequence, which had actually been known to Indian mathematicians since the 6th
Century, has many interesting mathematical properties, and many of the implications and
relationships of the sequence were not discovered until several centuries after Fibonacci's
death. For instance, the sequence regenerates itself in some surprising ways: every third F-
number is divisible by 2 (F3 = 2), every fourth F-number is divisible by 3 (F 4 = 3), every fifth F-
number is divisible by 5 (F5 = 5), every sixth F-number is divisible by 8 (F 6 = 8), every seventh
F-number is divisible by 13 (F7 = 13), etc. The numbers of the sequence has also been found
to be ubiquitous in nature: among other things, many species of flowering plants have
numbers of petals in the Fibonacci Sequence; the spiral arrangements of pineapples occur in
5s and 8s, those of pinecones in 8s and 13s, and the seeds of sunflower heads in 21s, 34s, 55s
or even higher terms in the sequence; etc.
In the 1750s, Robert Simson noted that the ratio of each term in the Fibonacci Sequence to
the previous term approaches, with ever greater accuracy the
higher the terms, a ratio of approximately 1 : 1.6180339887 (it
is actually an irrational number equal to (1 + 5)2 which has since
been calculated to thousands of decimal places). This value is
referred to as the Golden Ratio, also known as the Golden
Mean, Golden Section, Divine Proportion, etc, and is usually
denoted by the Greek letter phi (or sometimes the capital
letter Phi ). Essentially, two quantities are in the Golden Ratio
if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is
equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. The
Golden Ratio itself has many unique properties, such as 1 = -
1 (0.618...) and 2 = + 1 (2.618...), and there are countless
examples of it to be found both in nature and in the human
world.
A rectangle with sides in the ratio of 1 : is known as a Golden Rectangle, and many artists
and architects throughout history (dating back to ancient Egypt and Greece, but particularly
popular in the Renaissance art of Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries) have
proportioned their works approximately using the Golden Ratio and Golden Rectangles, which
are widely considered to be innately aesthetically pleasing. An arc connecting opposite points
of ever smaller nested Golden Rectangles forms a logarithmic spiral, known as a Golden
Spiral. The Golden Ratio and Golden Spiral can also be found in a surprising number of
instances in Nature, from shells to flowers to animal horns to human bodies to storm systems
to complete galaxies.
It should be remembered, though, that the Fibonacci Sequence was actually only a very minor
element in Liber Abaci - indeed, the sequence only received Fibonacci's name in 1877 when
Eduouard Lucas decided to pay tribute to him by naming the series after him - and that
Fibonacci himself was not responsible for identifying any of the interesting mathematical
properties of the sequence, its relationship to the Golden Mean and Golden Rectangles and
Spirals, etc.
However, the book's influence on medieval mathematics is undeniable, and it does also
include discussions of a number of other mathematical problems such as the Chinese
Remainder Theorem, perfect numbers and prime numbers, formulas for arithmetic series and
for square pyramidal numbers, Euclidean geometric proofs, and a study of simultaneous linear
equations along the lines of Diophantus and Al-Karaji. He also described the lattice (or sieve)
multiplication method of multiplying large numbers, a method - originally pioneered by Islamic
mathematicians like Al-Khwarizmi - algorithmically equivalent to long multiplication.
Neither was Liber Abaci Fibonaccis only book, although it was his most important one. His
Liber Quadratorum (The Book of Squares), for example, is a book on algebra, published in
1225 in which appears a statement of what is now called Fibonacci's identity - sometimes also
known as Brahmaguptas identity after the much earlier Indian mathematician who also came
to the same conclusions - that the product of two sums of two squares is itself a sum of two
squares e.g. (12 + 42)(22 + 72) = 262 + 152 = 302 + 12.
16TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS
The cultural, intellectual and artistic movement of the Renaissance, which saw a resurgence of
learning based on classical sources, began in Italy around the 14th Century, and gradually
spread across most of Europe over the next two centuries. Science and art were still very
much interconnected and intermingled at this time, as exemplified by the work of
artist/scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, and it is no surprise that, just as in art,
revolutionary work in the fields of philosophy and science was soon taking place.
It is a tribute to the respect in which mathematics was held in Renaissance Europe that
the famed German artist Albrecht Drer included an order-4 magic square in his
engraving "Melencolia I". In fact, it is a so-called "supermagic square" with many more
lines of addition symmetry than a regular 4 x 4 magic square (see image at right). The
year of the work, 1514, is shown in the two bottom central squares.
An important figure in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries is an Italian Franciscan
friar called Luca Pacioli, who published a book on arithmetic, geometry and book-
keeping at the end of the 15th Century which became quite popular for the
mathematical puzzles it contained. It also introduced symbols for plus and minus for
the first time in a printed book (although this is also sometimes attributed to Giel
Vander Hoecke, Johannes Widmann and others), symbols that were to become
standard notation. Pacioli also investigated the Golden Ratio of 1 : 1.618... (see the
section on Fibonacci) in his 1509 book "The Divine Proportion", concluding that the
number was a message from God and a source of secret knowledge about the inner beauty of seen by this time as an impossibility, requiring as it does an understanding of the square roots
things. of negative numbers. In the competition, he beat Scipione del Ferro (or at least del Ferro's
assistant, Fior), who had coincidentally produced his own partial solution to the cubic equation
problem not long before. Although del Ferro's solution perhaps predated Tartaglias, it was
During the 16th and early 17th Century, the equals, multiplication, division, radical (root),
much more limited, and Tartaglia is usually credited with the first general solution. In the
decimal and inequality symbols were gradually introduced and standardized. The use of
highly competitive and cut-throat environment of 16th Century Italy, Tartaglia even encoded
decimal fractions and decimal arithmetic is usually attributed to the Flemish mathematician
his solution in the form of a poem in an attempt to make it more difficult for other
Simon Stevin the late 16th Century, although the decimal point notation was not popularized
mathematicians to steal it.
until early in the 17th Century. Stevin was ahead of his time in enjoining that all types of
numbers, whether fractions, negatives, real numbers or surds (such as 2) should be treated
equally as numbers in their own right. Tartaglias definitive method was, however, leaked to Gerolamo Cardano (or Cardan), a rather
eccentric and confrontational mathematician, doctor and Renaissance man, and author
throughout his lifetime of some 131 books. Cardano published it himself in his 1545 book "Ars
In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in particular was famed
Magna" (despite having promised Tartaglia that he would not), along with the work of his own
for its intense public mathematics competitions. It was in just such a competion that the
brilliant student Lodovico Ferrari. Ferrari, on seeing Tartaglia's cubic solution, had realized that
unlikely figure of the young, self-taught Niccol Fontana Tartaglia revealed to the world the
he could use a similar method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x4).
formula for solving first one type, and later all types, of cubic equations (equations with terms
including x3), an achievement hitherto considered impossible and which had stumped the best
mathematicians of China, India and the Islamic world. In this work, Tartaglia, Cardano and Ferrari between them demonstrated the first uses of what
are now known as complex numbers, combinations of real and imaginary numbers of the
type a + bi, where i is the imaginary unit -1. It fell to another Bologna resident, Rafael
Building on Tartaglias work, another young Italian, Lodovico Ferrari, soon devised a similar
Bombelli, to explain, at the end of the 1560's, exactly what imaginary numbers really were
method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x4) and both solutions were
and how they could be used.
published by Gerolamo Cardano. Despite a decade-long fight over the publication, Tartaglia,
Cardano and Ferrari between them demonstrated the first uses of what are now known as
complex numbers, combinations of real and imaginary numbers (although it fell to another Although both of the younger men were acknowledged in the foreword of Cardano's book, as
Bologna resident, Rafael Bombelli, to explain what imaginary numbers really were and how well as in several places within its body, Tartgalia engaged Cardano in a decade-long fight
they could be used). Tartaglia went on to produce other important (although largely ignored) over the publication. Cardano argued that, when he happened to see (some years after the
formulas and methods, and Cardano published perhaps the first systematic treatment of 1535 competition) Scipione del Ferro's unpublished independent cubic equation solution,
probability. which was dated before Tartaglia's, he decided that his promise to Tartaglia could legitimately
be broken, and he included Tartaglia's solution in his next publication, along with Ferrari's
quartic solution.
With Hindu-Arabic numerals, standardized notation and the new language of algebra at their
disposal, the stage was set for the European mathematical revolution of the 17th Century.
Ferrari eventually came to understand cubic and quartic equations much better than Tartaglia.
When Ferrari challenged Tartaglia to another public debate, Tartaglia initially accepted, but
16TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS - TARTAGLIA, CARDANO & FERRARI
then (perhaps wisely) decided not to show up, and Ferrari won by default. Tartaglia was
thoroughly discredited and became effectively unemployable.
In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in particular was famed
for its intense public mathematics competitions. It was in just such a competition, in 1535,
Poor Tartaglia died penniless and unknown, despite having produced (in addition to his cubic
that the unlikely figure of the young Venetian Tartaglia first revealed a mathematical finding
equation solution) the first translation of Euclids Elements in a modern European language,
hitherto considered impossible, and which had stumped the best mathematicians of China,
formulated Tartaglia's Formula for the volume of a tetrahedron, devised a method to obtain
India and the Islamic world.
binomial coefficients called Tartaglia's Triangle (an earlier version of Pascal's Triangle), and
become the first to apply mathematics to the investigation of the paths of cannonballs (work
Niccol Fontana became known as Tartaglia (meaning the stammerer) for a speech defect which was later validated by Galileo's studies on falling bodies). Even today, the solution to
he suffered due to an injury he received in a battle against the invading French army. He was a cubic equations is usually known as Cardanos Formula and not Tartgalias.
poor engineer known for designing fortifications, a surveyor of topography (seeking the best
means of defence or offence in battles) and a bookkeeper in the Republic of Venice.
Ferrari, on the other hand, obtained a prestigious teaching post while still in his teens after
Cardano resigned from it and recommended him, and was eventually able to retired young
But he was also a self-taught, but wildly ambitious, mathematician. He distinguised himself by and quite rich, despite having started out as Cardanos servant.
producing, among other things, the first Italian translations of works
by Archimedes and Euclid from uncorrupted Greek texts (for two centuries, Euclid's
Cardano himself, an accomplished gambler and chess player, wrote a book called "Liber de
"Elements" had been taught from two Latin translations taken from an Arabic source, parts of
ludo aleae" ("Book on Games of Chance") when he was just 25 years old, which contains
which contained errors making them all but unusable), as well as an acclaimed compilation of
perhaps the first systematic treatment of probability (as well as a section on effective cheating
mathematics of his own.
methods). The ancient Greeks, Romans and Indians had all been inveterate gamblers, but
none of them had ever attempted to understand randomness as being governed by
Tartaglia's greates legacy to mathematical history, though, occurred when he won the 1535 mathematical laws.
Bologna University mathematics competition by demonstrating a general algebraic formula for
solving cubic equations (equations with terms including x3), something which had come to be
The book described the - now obvious, but then revolutionary - insight that, if a random event
has several equally likely outcomes, the chance of any individual outcome is equal to the
proportion of that outcome to all possible outcomes. The book was far ahead of its time,
though, and it remained unpublished until 1663, nearly a century after his death. It was the
only serious work on probability until Pascal's work in the 17th Century.
Cardano was also the first to describe hypocycloids, the pointed plane curves generated by
the trace of a fixed point on a small circle that rolls within a larger circle, and the generating
circles were later named Cardano (or Cardanic) circles.
The colourful Cardano remained notoriously short of money thoughout his life, largely due to
his gambling habits, and was accused of heresy in 1570 after publishing a horoscope of Jesus
(apparently, his own son contributed to the prosecution, bribed by Tartaglia).
17TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS
In the wake of the Renaissance, the 17th Century saw an unprecedented explosion of
mathematical and scientific ideas across Europe, a period sometimes called the Age of
Reason. Hard on the heels of the Copernican Revolution of Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th
Century, scientists like Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler were making equally
revolutionary discoveries in the exploration of the Solar system, leading to Keplers
formulation of mathematical laws of planetary motion.
The invention of the logarithm in the early 17th Century by John Napier (and later improved by
Napier and Henry Briggs) contributed to the advance of science, astronomy and mathematics
by making some difficult calculations relatively easy. It was one of the most significant
mathematical developments of the age, and 17th Century physicists like Kepler
and Newton could never have performed the complex calculatons needed for their innovations
without it. The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace remarked, almost
two centuries later, that Napier, by halving the labours of astronomers, had doubled their
lifetimes.
The logarithm of a number is the exponent when that number is expressed as a power of 10
(or any other base). It is effectively the inverse of exponentiation. For example, the base 10
logarithm of 100 (usually written log 10 100 or lg 100 or just log 100) is 2, because 10 2 = 100.
The value of logarithms arises from the fact that multiplication of two or more numbers is
equivalent to adding their logarithms, a much simpler operation. In the same way, division
involves the subtraction of logarithms, squaring is as simple as multiplying the logarithm by
two (or by three for cubing, etc), square roots requires dividing the logarithm by 2 (or by 3 for
cube roots, etc).
Although base 10 is the most popular base, another common base for logarithms is the
number e which has a value of 2.7182818... and which has special properties which make it
very useful for logarithmic calculations. These are known as natural logarithms, and are
written loge or ln. Briggs produced extensive lookup tables of common (base 10) logarithms,
and by 1622 William Oughted had produced a logarithmic slide rule, an instrument which
became indispensible in technological innovation for the next 300 years.
Napier also improved Simon Stevin's decimal notation and popularized the use of the decimal
point, and made lattice multiplication (originally developed by the Persian mathematician Al-
Khwarizmi and introduced into Europe by Fibonacci) more convenient with the introduction of
Napier's Bones, a multiplication tool using a set of numbered rods.
Although not principally a mathematician, the role of the Frenchman Marin Mersenne as a sort
of clearing house and go-between for mathematical thought in France during this period was
crucial. Mersenne is largely remembered in mathematics today in the term Mersenne primes -
prime numbers that are one less than a power of 2, e.g. 3 (2 2-1), 7 (23-1), 31 (25-1), 127 (27-1),
8191 (213-1), etc. In modern times, the largest known prime number has almost always been a
Mersenne prime, but in actual fact, Mersennes real connection with the numbers was only to
compile a none-too-accurate list of the smaller ones (when Edouard Lucas devised a method
of checking them in the 19th Century, he pointed out that Mersenne had incorrectly included
267-1 and left out 261-1, 289-1 and 2107-1 from his list).
The Frenchman Ren Descartes is sometimes considered the first of the modern school of
mathematics. His development of analytic geometry and Cartesian coordinates in the mid-
17th Century soon allowed the orbits of the planets to be plotted on a graph, as well as laying
the foundations for the later development of calculus (and much later multi-dimensional
geometry). Descartes is also credited with the first use of superscripts for powers or
exponents.
Two other great French mathematicians were close contemporaries of Descartes: Pierre de
Fermat and Blaise Pascal. Fermat formulated several theorems which greatly extended our
knowlege of number theory, as well as contributing some early work on infinitesimal
calculus. Pascal is most famous for Pascals Triangle of binomial coefficients, although similar
figures had actually been produced by Chinese and Persian mathematicians long before him.
It was an ongoing exchange of letters between Fermat and Pascal that led to the development
of the concept of expected values and the field of probability theory. The first published work
on probability theory, however, and the first to outline the concept of mathematical
expectation, was by the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens in 1657, although it was largely based
on the ideas in the letters of the two Frenchmen.
The French mathematician and engineer Girard Desargues is considered one of the founders
of the field of projective geometry, later developed further by Jean Victor Poncelet and
Gaspard Monge. Projective geometry considers what happens to shapes when they are
projected on to a non-parallel plane. For example, a circle may be projected into an ellipse or a
hyperbola, and so these curves may all be regarded as equivalent in projective geometry. In
particular, Desargues developed the pivotal concept of the point at infinity where parallels
actually meet. His perspective theorem states that, when two triangles are in perspective,
their corresponding sides meet at points on the same collinear line.
By standing on the shoulders of giants, the Englishman Sir Isaac Newton was able to pin
down the laws of physics in an unprecedented way, and he effectively laid the groundwork for
all of classical mechanics, almost single-handedly. But his contribution to mathematics should
never be underestimated, and nowadays he is often considered, along
with Archimedes and Gauss, as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
Newton and, independently, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz,
completely revolutionized mathematics (not to mention physics, engineering, economics and
science in general) by the development of infinitesimal calculus, with its two main operations,
differentiation and integration. Newton probably developed his work before Leibniz,
but Leibniz published his first, leading to an extended and rancorous dispute. Whatever the
truth behind the various claims, though, it is Leibnizs calculus notation that is the one still in
use today, and calculus of some sort is used extensively in everything from engineering to
economics to medicine to astronomy.
Both Newton and Leibniz also contributed greatly in other areas of mathematics,
including Newtons contributions to a generalized binomial theorem, the theory of finite
differences and the use of infinite power series, and Leibnizs development of a mechanical are inverse operations, and he also made complete translations of Euclid into Latin and
forerunner to the computer and the use of matrices to solve linear equations. English.

However, credit should also be given to some earlier 17th Century mathematicians whose
work partially anticipated, and to some extent paved the way for, the development of
infinitesimal calculus. As early as the 1630s, the Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri
developed a geometrical approach to calculus known as Cavalieri's principle, or the method
of indivisibles. The Englishman John Wallis, who systematized and extended the methods of
analysis of Descartes and Cavalieri, also made significant contributions towards the
development of calculus, as well as originating the idea of the number line, introducing the
symbol for infinity and the term continued fraction, and extending the standard notation
for powers to include negative integers and rational numbers. Newton's teacher Isaac Barrow
is usually credited with the discovery (or at least the first rigorous statrement of) the
fundamental theorem of calculus, which essentially showed that integration and differentiation