PREHISTORIC MATHEMATICS

Our prehistoric ancestors would have had a general sensibility about amounts, and would have instinctively known the difference between, say, one and two antelopes. But the intellectual leap from the concrete idea of two things to the invention of a symbol or word for the abstract idea of "two" took many ages to come about.

The Ishango bone, a tally stick from central Africa, dates from about 20,000 years ago

Even today, there are isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in Amazonia which only have words for "one", "two" and "many", and others which only have words for numbers up to five. In the absence of settled agriculture and trade, there is little need for a formal system of numbers. Early man kept track of regular occurrences such as the phases of the moon and the seasons. Some of the very earliest evidence of mankind thinking about numbers is from notched bones in Africa dating back to 35,000 to 20,000 years ago. But this is really mere counting and tallying rather than mathematics as such. Pre-dynastic Egyptians and Sumerians represented geometric designs on their artefacts as early as the 5th millennium BC, as did some megalithic societies in northern Europe in the 3rd millennium BC or before. But this is more art and decoration than the systematic treatment of figures, patterns, forms and quantities that has come to be considered as mathematics. Mathematics proper initially developed largely as a response to bureaucratic needs when civilizations settled and developed agriculture - for the measurement of plots of land, the taxation of individuals, etc - and this first occurred in the Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations of Mesopotamia (roughly, modern Iraq) and in ancientEgypt.

SUMERIAN/BABYLONIAN MATHEMATICS

Sumer (a region of Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq) was the birthplace of writing, the wheel, agriculture, the arch, the plow, irrigation and many other innovations, and is often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization. The Sumerians developed the earliest known writing system - a pictographic writing system known as cuneiform script, using wedge-shaped characters inscribed on baked clay tablets - and this has Sumerian Clay Cones meant that we actually have more knowledge of ancient Sumerian and Babylonian mathematics than of early Egyptian mathematics. Indeed, we even have what appear to school exercises in arithmetic and geometric problems. As in Egypt, Sumerian mathematics initially developed largely as a response to bureaucratic needs when their civilization settled and developed agriculture (possibly as early as the 6th millennium BC) for the measurement of plots of land, the taxation of individuals, etc. In addition, the Sumerians and Babylonians needed to describe quite large numbers as they attempted to chart the course of the night sky and develop their sophisticated lunar calendar. They were perhaps the first people to assign symbols to groups of objects in an attempt to make the description of larger numbers easier. They moved from using separate tokens or symbols to represent sheaves of wheat, jars of oil, etc, to the more abstract use of a symbol for specific numbers of anything. Starting as early as the 4th millennium BC, they began using a small clay cone to represent one, a clay ball for ten, and a large cone for sixty. Over the course of the third millennium, these objects were replaced by cuneiform equivalents so that numbers could be written with the same stylus that was being used for the words in the text. A rudimentary model of the abacus was probably in use in Sumeria from as early as 2700 - 2300 BC.

Sumerian and Babylonian mathematics was based on a sexegesimal, or base 60, numeric system, which could be counted physically using the twelve knuckles on one hand the five fingers on the other hand. Unlike those of theEgyptians, Greeks and Romans, Babylonian numbers used a true place-value system, where digits written in the left column represented larger values, much as in the modern decimal system, Babylonian Numerals although of course using base 60 not base 10. Thus, in the Babylonian system represented 3,600 plus 60 plus 1, or 3,661. Also, to represent the numbers 1 - 59 within each place value, two distinct symbols were used, a unit symbol ( ) and a ten symbol ( ) which were combined in a similar way to the familiar system of Roman numerals (e.g. 23 would be shown as ). Thus, represents 60 plus 23, or 83. However, the number 60 was represented by the same symbol as the number 1 and, because they lacked an equivalent of the decimal point, the actual place value of a symbol often had to be inferred from the context. It has been conjectured that Babylonian advances in mathematics were probably facilitated by the fact that 60 has many divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30 and 60 - in fact, 60 is the smallest integer divisible by all integers from 1 to 6), and the continued modern-day usage of of 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 (60 x 6) degrees in a circle, are all testaments to the ancient Babylonian system. It is for similar reasons that 12 (which has factors of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6) has been such a popular multiple historically (e.g. 12 months, 12 inches, 12 pence, 2 x 12 hours, etc). The Babylonians also developed another revolutionary mathematical concept, something else that theEgyptians, Greeks and Romans did not have, a circle character for zero, although its symbol was really still more of a placeholder than a number in its own right. We have evidence of the development of a complex system of metrology in Sumer from about 3000 BC, and multiplication and reciprocal (division) tables, tables of squares, square roots and cube roots, geometrical exercises and division problems from around 2600 BC onwards. Later Babylonian tablets dating from about 1800 to 1600 BC cover topics as varied as fractions, algebra, methods for solving linear, quadratic and even some cubic equations, and the calculation of regular reciprocal pairs (pairs of number which multiply together to give 60). One Babylonian tablet

gives an approximation to 2 accurate to an astonishing five decimal places. Others list the squares of numbers up to 59, the cubes of numbers up to 32 as well as tables of compound interest. Yet another gives an estimate for of 3 18 (3.125, a reasonable approximation of the real value of 3.1416). The idea of square numbers and quadratic equations (where the unknown quantity is multiplied by itself, e.g. x2) naturally arose in the context of the meaurement of land, and Babylonian mathematical tablets give us the first ever evidence of the solution of quadratic equations. The Babylonian approach to solving them Babylonian Clay tablets from c. 2100 BC showing a problem concerning usually revolved around a the area of an irregular shape kind of geometric game of slicing up and rearranging shapes, although the use of algebra and quadratic equations also appears. At least some of the examples we have appear to indicate problem-solving for its own sake rather than in order to resolve a concrete practical problem. The Babylonians used geometric shapes in their buildings and design and in dice for the leisure games which were so popular in their society, such as the ancient game of backgammon. Their geometry extended to the calculation of the areas of rectangles, triangles and trapezoids, as well as the volumes of simple shapes such as bricks and cylinders (although not pyramids). The famous and controversial Plimpton 322 clay tablet, believed to date from around 1800 BC, suggests that the Babylonians may well have known the secret of rightangled triangles (that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides) many centuries before the Greek Pythagoras. The tablet appears to list 15 perfect Pythagorean triangles with whole number sides, although some claim that they were merely academic exercises, and not deliberate manifestations of Pythagorean triples.

EGYPTIAN MATHEMATICS

The early Egyptians settled along the fertile Nile valley as early as about 6000 BC, and they began to record the patterns of lunar phases and the seasons, both for agricultural and religious reasons. The Pharaohs surveyors used measurements based on body parts (a palm was the width of the hand, a cubit Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic numerals the measurement from elbow to fingertips) to measure land and buildings very early in Egyptian history, and a decimal numeric system was developed based on our ten fingers. The oldest mathematical text from ancient Egypt discovered so far, though, is the Moscow Papyrus, which dates from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom around 2000 - 1800 BC. It is thought that the Egyptians introduced the earliest fully-developed base 10 numeration system at least as early as 2700 BC (and probably much early). Written numbers used a stroke for units, a heel-bone symbol for tens, a coil of rope for hundreds and a lotus plant for thousands, as well as other hieroglyphic symbols for higher powers of ten up to a million. However, there was no concept of place value, so larger numbers were rather unwieldy (although a million required just one character, a million minus one required fifty-four characters).

The Rhind Papyrus, dating from around 1650 BC, is a kind of instruction manual in arithmetic and geometry, and it gives us explicit demonstrations of how multiplication and division was carried out at that time. It also contains evidence of other mathematical knowledge, including unit fractions, composite and prime numbers, arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means, and how to solve first order linear equations as well as arithmetic and geometric series. The Berlin Papyrus, which dates from around 1300 BC, shows that ancient Egyptians could solve second-order algebraic (quadratic) equations.
Ancient Egyptian method of multiplication

Multiplication, for example, was achieved by a process of repeated doubling, of the number to be multiplied on one side and of one on the other. These corresponding blocks of counters could then be used as a kind of multiplication reference table: first, the combination of powers of two which add up to the number to be multiplied by was isolated, and then the corresponding blocks of counters on the other side yielded the answer. This effectively made use of the concept of binary numbers, over 3,000 years before Leibniz introduced it into the west, and many more years before the development of the computer was to fully explore its potential. Practical problems of trade and the market led to the development of a notation for fractions. The papyri which have come down to us demonstrate the use of unit fractions based on the symbol of the Eye of Horus, where each part of the eye represented a different fraction, each half of the previous one (i.e. half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, sixty-fourth), so that the total was one-sixty-fourth short of a whole, the first known example of a geometric series.

Unit fractions could also be used for simple division sums. For example, if they needed to divide 3 loaves among 5 people, they would first divide two of the loaves into thirds and the third loaf into fifths, then they would divide the left over third from the second loaf into five pieces. Thus, each person would receive one-third plus one-fifth plus one-fifteenth (which totals three-fifths, as we would expect). The Egyptians approximated the area of a circle by using shapes whose area they did know. They observed that the area of a circle of diameter 9 units, for example, was very close to the area of a square with sides of 8 units, so that the area of circles of other diameters could be obtained by multiplying the diameter by 89 and then squaring it. This gives an effective approximation of accurate to within less than one percent.

Ancient Egyptian method of division

The pyramids themselves are another indication of the sophistication of Egyptian mathematics. Setting aside claims that the pyramids are first known structures to observe the golden ratio of 1 : 1.618 (which may have occurred for purely aesthetic, and not mathematical, reasons), there is certainly evidence that they knew the formula for the volume of a pyramid - 13 times the height times the length times the width - as well as of a truncated or clipped pyramid. They were also aware, long before Pythagoras, of the rule that a triangle with sides 3, 4 and 5 units yields a perfect right angle, and Egyptian builders used ropes knotted at intervals of 3, 4 and 5 units in order to ensure exact right angles for their stonework (in fact, the 3-4-5 right triangle is often called "Egyptian").

GREEK MATHEMATICS

As the Greek empire began to spread its sphere of influence into Asia Minor,Mesopotamia and beyond, the Greeks were smart enough to adopt and adapt useful elements from the societies they conquered. This was as true of their mathematics Ancient Greek Herodianic numerals as anything else, and they adopted elements of mathematics from both the Babylonians and theEgyptians. But they soon started to make important contributions in their own right and, for the first time, we can acknowledge contributions by individuals. By the Hellenistic period, the Greeks had presided over one of the most dramatic and important revolutions in mathematical thought of all time. The ancient Greek numeral system, known as Attic or Herodianic numerals, was fully developed by about 450 BC, and in regular use possibly as early as the 7th Century BC. It was a base 10 system similar to the earlierEgyptian one (and even more similar to the later Roman system), with symbols for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 repeated as many times needed to represent the desired number. Addition was done by totalling separately the symbols (1s, 10s, 100s, etc) in the numbers to be added, and multiplication was a laborious process based on successive doublings (division was based on the inverse of this process).

But most of Greek mathematics was based Thales' Intercept Theorem on geometry. Thales, one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, who lived on the Ionian coast of Asian Minor in the first half of the 6th Century BC, is usually considered to have been the first to lay down guidelines for the abstract development of geometry, although what we know of his work (such as on similar and right triangles) now seems quite elementary. Thales established what has become known as Thales' Theorem, whereby if a triangle is drawn within a circle with the long side as a diameter of the circle, then the opposite angle will always be a right angle (as well as some other related properties derived from this). He is also credited with another theorem, also known as Thales' Theorem or the Intercept Theorem, about the ratios of the line segments that are created if two intersecting lines are intercepted by a pair of parallels (and, by extension, the ratios of the sides of similar triangles). To some extent, however, the legend of the 6th Century BC mathematician Pythagoras of Samos has become synonymous with the birth of Greek mathematics. Indeed, he is believed to have coined both the words "philosophy" ("love of wisdom") and "mathematics" ("that which is learned"). Pythagoras was perhaps the first to realize that a complete system of mathematics could be constructed, where geometric elements corresponded with numbers. Pythagoras Theorem (or the Pythagorean Theorem) is one of the best known of all mathematical theorems. But he remains a controversial figure, as we will see, and Greek mathematics was by no means limited to one man. Three geometrical problems in particular, often referred to as the Three Classical Problems, and all to be solved by purely geometric means using only a straight edge and a compass, date back to the early days of Greek geometry: the squaring (or quadrature) of the circle, the doubling (or duplicating) of the cube and the trisection of an angle. These intransigent problems were profoundly influential on future geometry and led to many fruitful discoveries,

The Three Classical Problems

although their actual solutions (or, as it turned out, the proofs of their impossibility) had to wait until the 19th Century. Hippocrates of Chios (not to be confused with the great Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos) was one such Greek mathematician who applied himself to these problems during the 5th Century BC (his contribution to the squaring the circle problem is known as the Lune of Hippocrates). His influential book The Elements, dating to around 440 BC, was the first compilation of the elements of geometry, and his work was an important source for Euclid's later work. It was the Greeks who first grappled with the idea of infinity, such as described in the well-known paradoxes attributed to the philosopher Zeno of Elea in the 5th Century BC. The most famous of his paradoxes is that of Achilles and the Tortoise, which describes a theoretical race between Achilles and a tortoise. Achilles gives the much slower tortoise a head start, but by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has already moved ahead. By the time Achilles Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise reaches that point, the tortoise has moved on again, etc, etc, so that in principle the swift Achilles can never catch up with the slow tortoise. Paradoxes such as this one and Zeno's so-called Dichotomy Paradox are based on the infinite divisibility of space and time, and rest on the idea that a half plus a quarter plus an eighth plus a sixteenth, etc, etc, to infinity will never quite equal a whole. The paradox stems, however, from the false assumption that it is impossible to complete an infinite number of discrete dashes in a finite time, although it is extremely difficult to definitively prove the fallacy. The ancient Greek Aristotle was the first of many to try to disprove the paradoxes, particularly as he was a firm believer that infinity could only ever be potential and not real. Democritus, most famous for his prescient ideas about all matter being composed of tiny atoms, was also a pioneer of mathematics and geometry in the 5th - 4th Century BC, and he produced works with titles like "On Numbers", "On Geometrics", "On Tangencies", "On Mapping" and "On Irrationals", although these works have not survived. We do know that he was among the first to observe that a cone (or

pyramid) has one-third the volume of a cylinder (or prism) with the same base and height, and he is perhaps the first to have seriously considered the division of objects into an infinite number of cross-sections. However, it is certainly true that Pythagoras in particular greatly influenced those who came after him, including Plato, who established his famous Academy in Athens in 387 BC, and his protg Aristotle, whose work on logic was regarded as definitive for over two thousand years. Plato the mathematician is best known for his description of the five Platonic solids, but the value of his work as a teacher and popularizer of mathematics can not be understated. Platos student Eudoxus of Cnidus is usually credited with the first implementation of the method of exhaustion (later developed by Archimedes), an early method of integration by successive approximations which he used for the calculation of the volume of the pyramid and cone. He also developed a general theory of proportion, which was applicable to incommensurable (irrational) magnitudes that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers, as well as to commensurable (rational) magnitudes, thus extending Pythagoras incomplete ideas. Perhaps the most important single contribution of the Greeks, though and Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle were all influential in this respect - was the idea of proof, and the deductive method of using logical steps to prove or disprove theorems from initial assumed axioms. Older cultures, like the Egyptians and theBabylonians, had relied on inductive reasoning, that is using repeated observations to establish rules of thumb. It is this concept of proof that give mathematics its power and ensures that proven theories are as true today as they were two thousand years ago, and which laid the foundations for the systematic approach to mathematics of Euclid and those who came after him.

GREEK MATHEMATICS - PYTHAGORAS

Pythagoras of Samos (c.570-495 BC)

It is sometimes claimed that we owe pure mathematics to Pythagoras, and he is often called the first "true" mathematician. But, although his contribution was clearly important, he nevertheless remains a controversial figure. He left no mathematical writings himself, and much of what we know about Pythagorean thought comes to us from the writings of Philolaus and other later Pythagorean scholars. Indeed, it is by no means clear whether many (or indeed any) of the theorems ascribed to him were in fact solved by Pythagoras personally or by his followers. The school he established at Croton in southern Italy around 530 BC was the nucleus of a rather bizarre Pythagorean sect. Although Pythagorean thought was largely dominated by mathematics, it was also profoundly mystical, and Pythagoras imposed his quasi-religious philosophies, strict vegetarianism, communal living, secret rites and odd rules on all the members of his school (including bizarre and apparently random edicts about never urinating towards the sun, never marrying a woman who wears gold jewellery, never passing an ass lying in the street, never eating or even touching black fava beans, etc) . The members were divided into the "mathematikoi" (or "learners"), who extended and developed the more mathematical and scientific work that Pythagoras himself began, and the "akousmatikoi" (or "listeners"), who focused on the more religious and ritualistic aspects of his teachings. There was always a certain amount of friction between the two groups and eventually the sect became caught up in some fierce local fighting and ultimately dispersed. Resentment built up against the secrecy and exclusiveness of the Pythagoreans and, in 460 BC, all their meeting places were burned and destroyed, with at least 50 members killed in Croton alone. The over-riding dictum of Pythagoras's school was All is number or God is number, and the Pythagoreans effectively practised a kind of numerology or number-worship, and considered each number to have its own character and meaning. For example, the number one was the generator of all numbers; two represented opinion; three, harmony; four, justice; five, marriage; six, creation; seven, the seven planets or wandering stars; etc. Odd numbers were thought of as female and even numbers as male.

The holiest number of all was "tetractys" or ten, a triangular number composed of the sum of one, two, three and four. It is a great tribute to the Pythagoreans' intellectual achievements that they deduced the special place of the number 10 from an abstract mathematical argument rather than from something as mundane as counting the fingers on two hands. However, Pythagoras and his school - as well as a handful of other mathematicians of ancient The Pythagorean Tetractys Greece - was largely responsible for introducing a more rigorous mathematics than what had gone before, building from first principles using axioms and logic. Before Pythagoras, for example, geometry had been merely a collection of rules derived by empirical measurement. Pythagoras discovered that a complete system of mathematics could be constructed, where geometric elements corresponded with numbers, and where integers and their ratios were all that was necessary to establish an entire system of logic and truth. He is mainly remembered for what has become known as Pythagoras Theorem (or the Pythagorean Theorem): that, for any right-angled triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse (the longest side, opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides (or legs). Written as an equation: a2 + b2 = c2. What Pythagoras and his followers did not realize is that this also works for any shape: thus, the area of a pentagon on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the pentagons on the other two sides, as it does for a semi-circle or any other regular (or even irregular( shape.

The simplest and most commonly quoted example of a Pythagorean triangle is one with sides of 3, 4 and 5 units (32 + 42 = 52, as can be seen by drawing a grid of unit squares on each side as in the diagram at right), but there are a potentially infinite number of other integer Pythagorean triples, starting with (5, 12 13), (6, 8, 10), (7, 24, 25), (8, 15, 17), (9, 40, 41), etc. It should be noted, however that (6, 8, 10) is not what is known as a primitive Pythagorean triple, because it is just a multiple of (3, 4, 5). Pythagoras Theorem and Pythagoras' (Pythagorean) Theorem the properties of rightangled triangles seems to be the most ancient and widespread mathematical development after basic arithmetic and geometry, and it was touched on in some of the most ancient mathematical texts from Babylon andEgypt, dating from over a thousand years earlier. One of the simplest proofs comes from ancient China, and probably dates from well before Pythagoras' birth. It was Pythagoras, though, who gave the theorem its definitive form, although it is not clear whether Pythagoras himself definitively proved it or merely described it. Either way, it has become one of the best-known of all mathematical theorems, and as many as 400 different proofs now exist, some geometrical, some algebraic, some involving advanced differential equations, etc. It soom became apparent, though, that non-integer solutions were also possible, so that an isosceles triangle with sides 1, 1 and 2, for example, also has a right angle, as the Babylonians had discovered centuries earlier. However, when Pythagorass student Hippasus tried to calculate the value of 2, he found that it was not possible to express it as a fraction, thereby indicating the potential existence of a whole new world of numbers, the irrational numbers (numbers that can not be expressed as simple fractions of integers). This discovery rather shattered the elegant mathematical world built up by Pythagoras and his followers, and the existence of a number that could not be expressed as the ratio of two of God's creations (which is how they thought of the integers) jeopardized the cult's entire belief system. Poor Hippasus was apparently drowned by the secretive Pythagoreans for broadcasting this important discovery to the outside world. But the replacement of the idea of the divinity of the integers by the richer concept of the continuum, was an

essential development in mathematics. It marked the real birth of Greek geometry, which deals with lines and planes and angles, all of which are continuous and not discrete. Among his other achievements in geometry, Pythagoras (or at least his followers, the Pythagoreans) also realized that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles (180), and probably also the generalization which states that the sum of the interior angles of a polygon with n sides is equal to (2n - 4) right angles, and that the sum of its exterior angles equals 4 right angles. They were able to construct figures of a given area, and to use simple geometrical algebra, for example to solve equations such as a(a - x) = x2 by geometrical means. The Pythagoreans also established the foundations of number theory, with their investigations of triangular, square and also perfect numbers (numbers that are the sum of their divisors). They discovered several new properties of square numbers, such as that the square of a number n is equal to the sum of the first n odd numbers (e.g. 42 = 16 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7). They also discovered at least the first pair of amicable numbers, 220 and 284 (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). Pythagoras is also credited with the discovery that the intervals between harmonious musical notes always have whole number ratios. For instance, playing half a length of a guitar string gives the same note as the open string, but an octave higher; a third of a length gives a different but harmonious note; etc. Nonwhole number ratios, on the other hand, tend to give dissonant sounds. In this way, Pythagoras Pythagoras is credited with the discovery of the ratios between described the first four harmonious musical tones overtones which create the common intervals which have become the primary building blocks of musical harmony: the octave (1:1), the perfect fifth (3:2), the perfect fourth (4:3) and the major third (5:4). The oldest way of tuning the 12-note chromatic scale is known as Pythagorean tuning, and it is based on a stack of perfect fifths, each tuned in the ratio 3:2.

The mystical Pythagoras was so excited by this discovery that he became convinced that the whole universe was based on numbers, and that the planets and stars moved according to mathematical equations, which corresponded to musical notes, and thus produced a kind of symphony, the Musical Universalis or Music of the Spheres.

GREEK MATHEMATICS - PLATO

Although usually remembered today as a philosopher, Plato was also one of ancient Greeces most important patrons of mathematics. Inspired byPythagoras, he founded his Academy in Athens in 387 BC, where he stressed mathematics as a way of understanding more about reality. In particular, he was convinced that geometry was the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. The sign above the Academy entrance read: Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here. Plato played an important role in encouraging and inspiring Greek intellectuals to study mathematics as well as philosophy. His Academy taught mathematics as a branch of philosophy, as Pythagoras had done, and the first 10 years of the 15 year course at the Academy involved the study of science and mathematics, including plane and solid geometry, astronomy and harmonics. Plato became known as the "maker of mathematicians", and his Academy boasted some of the most prominent mathematicians of the ancient world, including Eudoxus, Theaetetus and Archytas.

Plato (c.428-348 BC)

He demanded of his students accurate definitions, clearly stated assumptions, and logical deductive proof, and he insisted that geometric proofs be demonstrated with no aids other than a straight edge and a compass. Among the many mathematical problems Plato posed for his students investigation were the so-called Three Classical Problems (squaring the circle, doubling the cube and trisecting the angle) and to some extent these problems have become identified with Plato, although he was not the first to pose them.

Plato the mathematician is perhaps best known for his identification of 5 regular symmetrical 3-dimensional shapes, which he maintained were the basis for the whole universe, and which have become known as the Platonic Solids: the tetrahedron (constructed of 4 regular triangles, and which for Plato represented fire), the octahedron (composed of 8 triangles, representing air), the icosahedron (composed of 20 triangles, and representing water), the cube (composed of 6 Platonic Solids squares, and representing earth), and the dodecahedron (made up of 12 pentagons, which Plato obscurely described as the god used for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven). The tetrahedron, cube and dodecahedron were probably familiar to Pythagoras, and the octahedron and icosahedron were probably discovered by Theaetetus, a contemporary of Plato. Furthermore, it fell to Euclid, half a century later, to prove that these were the only possible convex regular polyhedra. But they nevertheless became popularly known as the Platonic Solids, and inspired mathematicians and geometers for many centuries to come. For example, around 1600, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler devised an ingenious system of nested Platonic solids and spheres to approximate quite well the distances of the known planets from the Sun (although he was enough of a scientist to abandon his elegant model when it proved to be not accurate enough).

HELLENISTIC MATHEMATICS

By the 3rd Century BC, in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, mathematical breakthroughs were also beginning to be made on the edges of the Greek Hellenistic empire. In particular, Alexandria in Egypt became a great centre of learning under the beneficent rule of the Ptolemies, and its famous Library soon gained a reputation to rival that of the Athenian Academy. The patrons of the Library were arguably the first professional scientists, paid for their devotion to research. Among the best known and most influential mathematicians who studied and taught at Alexandria wereEuclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Heron, Menelaus and Diophantus.

The Sieve of Eratosthenes

During the late 4th and early 3rd Century BC, Euclid was the great chronicler of the mathematics of the time, and one of the most influential teachers in history. He virtually invented classical (Euclidean) geometry as we know it. Archimedes spent most of his life in Syracuse, Sicily, but also studied for a while in Alexandria. He is perhaps best known as an engineer and inventor but, in the light of recent discoveries, he is now considered of one of the greatest pure mathematicians of all time. Eratosthenes of Alexandria was a near contemporary of Archimedes in the 3rd Century BC. A mathematician, astronomer and geographer, he devised the first system of latitude and longitude, and calculated the circumference of the earth to a remarkable degree of accuracy. As a mathematician, his greatest legacy is the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm for identifying prime numbers.

It is not known exactly when the great Library of Alexandria burned down, but Alexandria remained an important intellectual centre for some centuries. In the 1st century BC, Heron (or Hero) was another great Alexandrian inventor, best known in mathematical circles for Heronian triangles (triangles with integer sides and integer area), Herons Formula for finding the area of a triangle from its side lengths, and Herons Method for iteratively computing a square root. He was also the first mathematician to confront at least the idea of Menelaus of Alexandria introduced the concept of spherical triangle -1 (although he had no idea how to treat it, something which had to wait for Tartaglia and Cardano in the16th Century). Menelaus of Alexandria, who lived in the 1st - 2nd Century AD, was the first to recognize geodesics on a curved surface as the natural analogues of straight lines on a flat plane. His book Sphaerica dealt with the geometry of the sphere and its application in astronomical measurements and calculations, and introduced the concept of spherical triangle (a figure formed of three great circle arcs, which he named "trilaterals"). In the 3rd Century AD, Diophantus of Alexandria was the first to recognize fractions as numbers, and is considered an early innovator in the field of what would later become known as algebra. He applied himself to some quite complex algebraic problems, including what is now known as Diophantine Analysis, which deals with finding integer solutions to kinds of problems that lead to equations in several unknowns (Diophantine equations). Diophantus Arithmetica, a collection of problems giving numerical solutions of both determinate and indeterminate equations, was the most prominent work on algebra in all Greek mathematics, and his problems exercised the minds of many of the world's best mathematicians for much of the next two millennia.

But Alexandria was not the only centre of learning in the Hellenistic Greek empire. Mention should also be made of Apollonius of Perga (a city in modernday southern Turkey) whose late 3rd Century BC work on geometry (and, in particular, on conics and conic sections) was very influential on later European mathematicians. It was Apollonius who gave the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola the names by which we know them, and showed how they could be derived from different sections through a cone.

Conic sections of Apollonius

Hipparchus, who was also from Hellenistic Anatolia and who live in the 2nd Century BC, was perhaps the greatest of all ancient astronomers. He revived the use of arithmetic techniques first developed by the Chaldeans and Babylonians, and is usually credited with the beginnings of trigonometry. He calculated (with remarkable accuracy for the time) the distance of the moon from the earth by measuring the different parts of the moon visible at different locations and calculating the distance using the properties of triangles. He went on to create the first table of chords (side lengths corresponding to different angles of a triangle). By the time of the great Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd Century AD, however, Greek mastery of numerical procedures had progressed to the point where Ptolemy was able to include in his Almagest a table of trigonometric chords in a circle for steps of which (although expressed sexagesimally in the Babylonian style) is accurate to about five decimal places. By the middle of the 1st Century BC and thereafter, however, the Romans had tightened their grip on the old Greek empire. The Romans had no use for pure mathematics, only for its practical applications, and the Christian regime that followed it even less so. The final blow to the Hellenistic mathematical heritage at Alexandria might be seen in the figure of Hypatia, the first recorded female mathematician, and a renowned teacher who had written some respected commentaries on Diophantus and Apollonius. She was dragged to her death by a Christian mob in 415 AD.

ROMAN MATHEMATICS

By the middle of the 1st Century BC, the Roman had tightened their grip on the old Greek and Hellenistic e mpires, and the mathematical revolution of theGreeks ground to halt. Despite all their advances Roman numerals in other respects, no mathematical innovations occurred under the Roman Empire and Republic, and there were no mathematicians of note. The Romans had no use for pure mathematics, only for its practical applications, and the Christian regime that followed it (after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire) even less so. Roman numerals are well known today, and were the dominant number system for trade and administration in most of Europe for the best part of a millennium. It was decimal (base 10) system but not directly positional, and did not include a zero, so that, for arithmetic and mathematical purposes, it was a clumsy and inefficient system. It was Roman arithmetic based on letters of the Roman alphabet - I, V, X, L, C, D and M - combines to signify the sum of their values (e.g. VII = V + I + I = 7). Later, a subtractive notation was also adopted, where VIIII, for example, was replaced by IX (10 - 1 = 9), which simplified the writing of numbers a little, but made calculation even more difficult, requiring conversion of the subtractive notation at the beginning of a sum and then its re-application at the end (see image at right). Due to the difficulty of written arithmetic using Roman numeral notation, calculations were usually performed with an abacus, based on earlier Babylonian and Greek abaci.

MAYAN MATHEMATICS

The Mayan civilisation had settled in the region of Central America from about 2000 BC, although the so-called Classic Period stretches from about 250 AD to 900 AD. At its peak, it was one of the most densely populated and culturally dynamic societies in the world. The importance of astronomy and calendar calculations in Mayan Mayan numerals society required mathematics, and the Maya constructed quite early a very sophisticated number system, possibly more advanced than any other in the world at the time (although the dating of developments is quite difficult). The Mayan and other Mesoamerican cultures used a vigesimal number system based on base 20 (and, to some extent, base 5), probably originally developed from counting on fingers and toes. The numerals consisted of only three symbols: zero, represented as a shell shape; one, a dot; and five, a bar. Thus, addition and subtraction was a relatively simple matter of adding up dots and bars. After the number 19, larger numbers were written in a kind of vertical place value format using powers of 20: 1, 20, 400, 8000, 160000, etc (see image above), although in their calendar calculations they gave the third position a value of 360 instead of 400 (higher positions revert to multiples of 20). The pre-classic Maya and their neighbours had independently developed the concept of zero by at least as early as 36 BC, and we have evidence of their working with sums up to the hundreds of millions, and with dates so large it took several lines just to represent them. Despite not possessing the concept of a fraction, they produced extremely accurate astronomical observations using no instruments other than sticks, and were able to measure the length of the solar year to a far higher degree of accuracy than that used in Europe (their calculations produced 365.242 days, compared to the modern value of 365.242198), as well as the length of the lunar month (their estimate was 29.5308 days, compared to the modern value of 29.53059). However, due to the geographical disconnect, Mayan and Mesoamerican mathematics had absolutely no influence on Old World (European and Asian) numbering systems and mathematics.

CHINESE MATHEMATICS

Even as mathematical developments in the ancient Greek world were beginning to falter during the final centuries BC, the burgeoning trade empire of China was leading Chinese mathematics to ever greater heights. The simple but efficient ancient Chinese numbering system, which Ancient Chinese number system dates back to at least the 2nd millennium BC, used small bamboo rods arranged to represent the numbers 1 to 9, which were then places in columns representing units, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. It was therefore a decimal place value system, very similar to the one we use today - indeed it was the first such number system, adopted by the Chinese over a thousand years before it was adopted in the West - and it made even quite complex calculations very quick and easy. Written numbers, however, employed the slightly less efficient system of using a different symbol for tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. This was largely because there was no concept or symbol of zero, and it had the effect of limiting the usefulness of the written number in Chinese. The use of the abacus is often thought of as a Chinese idea, although some type of abacus was in use inMesopotamia, Egypt and Greece, probably much earlier than in China (the first Chinese abacus, or suanpan, we know of dates to about the 2nd Century BC). There was a pervasive fascination with numbers and mathematical patterns in ancient China, and different numbers were believed to have cosmic significance. In particular, magic squares - squares of numbers where each row, column and diagonal added up to the same total - were regarded as having great spiritual and religious significance. The Lo Shu Square, an order three square where

Lo Shu magic square, with its traditional graphical representation

each row, column and diagonal adds up to 15, is perhaps the earliest of these, dating back to around 650 BC (the legend of Emperor Yus discovery of the the square on the back of a turtle is set as taking place in about 2800 BC). But soon, bigger magic squares were being constructed, with even greater magical and mathematical powers, culminating in the elaborate magic squares, circles and triangles of Yang Hui in the 13th Century (Yang Hui also produced a trianglular representation of binomial coefficients identical to the later Pascals Triangle, and was perhaps the first to use decimal fractions in the modern form). But the main thrust of Chinese mathematics developed in response to the empires growing need for mathematically competent administrators. A textbook called Jiuzhang Suanshu or Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art (written over a period of time from about 200 BC onwards, probably by a variety of authors) became an important tool in the education of such a civil service, covering hundreds of problems in practical areas such as trade, taxation, engineering and the payment of wages. It was particularly important as a guide to how to solve equations the deduction of an unknown number from other known information Early Chinese method of solving equations using a sophisticated matrix-based method which did not appear in the West untilCarl Friedrich Gauss re-discovered it at the beginning of the 19th Century (and which is now known as Gaussian elimination). Among the greatest mathematicians of ancient China was Liu Hui, who produced a detailed commentary on the Nine Chapters in 263 AD, was one of the first mathematicians known to leave roots unevaluated, giving more exact results instead of approximations. By an approximation using a regular polygon with 192 sides, he also formulated an algorithm which calculated the value of as 3.14159 (correct to

five decimal places), as well as developing a very early forms of both integral and differential calculus. The Chinese went on to solve far more complex equations using far larger numbers than those outlined in the Nine Chapters, though. They also started to pursue more abstract mathematical problems (although usually couched in rather artificial practical terms), including what has become known as the Chinese Remainder Theorem. This uses the remainders after dividing an unknown number by a succession of smaller numbers, such as 3, 5 and 7, in order to calculate the smallest value of the unknown number. A technique for solving such problems, initially posed by Sun Tzu in the 3rd Century AD and considered one of the jewels of mathematics, The Chinese Remainder Theorem was being used to measure planetary movements by Chinese astronomers in the 6th Century AD, and even today it has practical uses, such as in Internet cryptography. By the 13th Century, the Golden Age of Chinese mathematics, there were over 30 prestigious mathematics schools scattered across China. Perhaps the most brilliant Chinese mathematician of this time was Qin Jiushao, a rather violent and corrupt imperial administrator and warrior, who explored solutions to quadratic and even cubic equations using a method of repeated approximations very similar to that later devised in the West by Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th Century. Qin even extended his technique to solve (albeit approximately) equations involving numbers up to the power of ten, extraordinarily complex mathematics for its time.

INDIAN MATHEMATICS

Despite developing quite independently of Chinese (and probably also ofBabylonian mathematics) , some very advanced mathematical discoveries were made at a very early time in India. Mantras from the early Vedic period (before 1000 BC) invoke powers of ten The evolution of Hindu-Arabic numerals from a hundred all the way up to a trillion, and provide evidence of the use of arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, fractions, squares, cubes and roots. A 4th Century AD Sanskrit text reports Buddha enumerating numbers up to 1053, as well as describing six more numbering systems over and above these, leading to a number equivalent to 10 421. Given that there are an estimated 1080 atoms in the whole universe, this is as close to infinity as any in the ancient world came. It also describes a series of iterations in decreasing size, in order to demonstrate the size of an atom, which comes remarkably close to the actual size of a carbon atom (about 70 trillionths of a metre). As early as the 8th Century BC, long before Pythagoras, a text known as the Sulba Sutras (or "Sulva Sutras") listed several simple Pythagorean triples, as well as a statement of the simplified Pythagorean theorem for the sides of a square and for a rectangle (indeed, it seems quite likely that Pythagoras learned his basic geometry from the "Sulba Sutras"). The Sutras also contain geometric solutions of linear and quadratic equations in a single unknown, and give a remarkably accurate figure for the square root of 2, obtained by adding 1 + 13 + 1(3 x 4) + 1(3 x 4 x 34), which yields a value of 1.4142156, correct to 5 decimal places. As early as the 3rd or 2nd Century BC, Jain mathematicians recognized five different types of infinities: infinite in one direction, in two directions, in area, infinite everywhere and perpetually infinite. Ancient Buddhist literature also demonstrates a prescient awareness of indeterminate and infinite numbers, with numbers deemed to be of three types: countable, uncountable and infinite. Like the Chinese, the Indians early discovered the benefits of a decimal place value number system, and were certainly using it before about the 3rd Century AD. They refined and perfected the system, particularly the written representation of the numerals, creating the ancestors of the nine numerals that (thanks to its dissemination by medieval Arabic mathematicans) we use across the world today, sometimes considered one of the greatest intellectual innovations of all time.

The Indians were also responsible for another hugely important development in mathematics. The earliest recorded usage of a circle character for the number zero is usually attributed to a 9th Century engraving in a temple in Gwalior in central India. But the brilliant conceptual leap to The earliest use of a circle character for the number zero was in India include zero as a number in its own right (rather than merely as a placeholder, a blank or empty space within a number, as it had been treated until that time) is usually credited to the 7th Century Indian mathematicians Brahmagupta - or possibly another Indian, Bhaskara I - even though it may well have been in practical use for centuries before that. The use of zero as a number which could be used in calculations and mathematical investigations, would revolutionize mathematics. Brahmagupta established the basic mathematical rules for dealing with zero: 1 + 0 = 1; 1 - 0 = 1; and 1 x 0 = 0 (the breakthrough which would make sense of the apparently non-sensical operation 1 0 would also fall to an Indian, the 12th Century mathematician Bhaskara II). Brahmagupta also established rules for dealing with negative numbers, and pointed out that quadratic equations could in theory have two possible solutions, one of which could be negative. He even attempted to write down these rather abstract concepts, using the initials of the names of colours to represent unknowns in his equations, one of the earliest intimations of what we now know as algebra. The so-called Golden Age of Indian mathematics can be said to extend from the 5th to 12th Centuries, and many of its mathematical discoveries predated similar discoveries in the West by several centuries, which has led to some claims of plagiarism by later European mathematicians, at least some of whom were probably aware of the earlier Indian work. Certainly, it seems that Indian contributions to mathematics have not been given due acknowledgement until very recently in modern history.

Golden Age Indian mathematicians made fundamental advances in the theory of trigonometry, a method of linking geometry and numbers first developed by the Greeks. They used ideas like the sine, cosine and tangent functions (which relate the angles of a triangle to the relative lengths of its sides) to survey the land around them, navigate the seas and even chart the Indian astronomers used trigonometry tables to estimate the relative heavens. For instance, distance of the Earth to the Sun and Moon Indian astronomers used trigonometry to calculated the relative distances between the Earth and the Moon and the Earth and the Sun. They realized that, when the Moon is half full and directly opposite the Sun, then the Sun, Moon and Earth form a right angled triangle, and were able to accurately measure the angle as 17. Their sine tables gave a ratio for the sides of such a triangle as 400:1, indicating that the Sun is 400 times further away from the Earth than the Moon. Although the Greeks had been able to calculate the sine function of some angles, the Indian astronomers wanted to be able to calculate the sine function of any given angle. A text called the Surya Siddhanta, by unknown authors and dating from around 400 AD, contains the roots of modern trigonometry, including the first real use of sines, cosines, inverse sines, tangents and secants. As early as the 6th Century AD, the great Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata produced categorical definitions of sine, cosine, versine and inverse sine, and specified complete sine and versine tables, in 3.75 intervals from 0 to 90, to an accuracy of 4 decimal places. Aryabhata also demonstrated solutions to simultaneous quadratic equations, and produced an approximation for the value of equivalent to 3.1416, correct to four decimal places. He used this to estimate the circumference of the Earth, arriving at a figure of 24,835 miles, only 70 miles off its true value. But, perhaps even more astonishing, he seems to have been aware that is an irrational number, and that any calculation can only ever be an approximation, something not proved in Europe until 1761.

Bhaskara II, who lived in the 12th Century, was one of the most accomplished of all Indias great mathematicians. He is credited with explaining the previously misunderstood operation of division by zero. He noticed that dividing one into two pieces yields a half, so 1 12 = 2. Similarly, 1 13 = 3. So, dividing 1 by smaller and smaller factions yields a larger and larger number of pieces. Ultimately, therefore, dividing one into pieces of zero size would yield infinitely many pieces, indicating that 1 0 = (the symbol for infinity).

Illustration of infinity as the reciprocal of zero

However, Bhaskara II also made important contributions to many different areas of mathematics from solutions of quadratic, cubic and quartic equations (including negative and irrational solutions) to solutions of Diophantine equations of the second order to preliminary concepts of infinitesimal calculus and mathematical analysis to spherical trigonometry and other aspects of trigonometry. Some of his findings predate similar discoveries in Europe by several centuries, and he made important contributions in terms of the systemization of (then) current knowledge and improved methods for known solutions. The Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics was founded in the late 14th Century by Madhava of Sangamagrama, sometimes called the greatest mathematician-astronomer of medieval India. He developed infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric functions, including , sine, etc. Some of his contributions to geometry and algebra and his early forms of differentiation and integration for simple functions may have been transmitted to Europe via Jesuit missionaries, and it is possible that the later European development of calculus was influenced by his work to some extent.

ISLAMIC MATHEMATICS

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 Some examples of the complex symmetries used in Islamic temple complex geometric decoration 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. Among other things, AlKaraji used mathematical induction to prove the binomial theorem. A binomial is a simple type of Binomial Theorem algebraic expression which has just two terms which are operated 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 Pascal, although many other mathematicians had studied it centuries before him in India, Persia, China andItaly, including Al-Karaji. Some hundred years after Al-Karaji, Omar Khayyam (perhaps better known as a poet and the writer of the Rubaiyat, but an important mathematician and astronomer in his own right) generalized Indian methods for extracting square and cube roots to include fourth, fifth and higher roots in the early 12th Century. He carried out a systematic analysis of cubic problems, 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 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 and Tartaglia.

The 13th Century Persian astronomer, scientist and mathematician Nasir AlDin Al-Tusi was perhaps the first to treat trigonometry as a separate mathematical discipline, distinct from astronomy. Building on earlier work byGreek 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 Al-Tusi was a pioneer in the field of spherical trigonometry plane triangles, a(sin A) = b(sin B) =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.

With the stifling influence of the Turkish Ottoman Empire from the 14th or 15th Century onwards, Islamic mathematics stagnated, and further developments moved to Europe.

MEDIEVAL MATHEMATICS
During the centuries in which theChinese, Indian and Isl amicmathematicians had been in the ascendancy, Europe had fallen into the Dark Ages, in which science, mathematics and almost 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 subjects in metaphysics and theology, such as "How many angels can stand on the point of a needle?" From the 4th to 12th Medieval abacus, based on the Roman/Greek model 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 Greekand 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 nicknameFibonacci. 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 Descartespopularized the idea, as well as perhaps the first time-speeddistance 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).

Oresme was one of the first to use graphical analysis

The German scholar Regiomontatus was perhaps the most capable mathematician of the 15th Century, his main contribution to mathematics being in the area of

trigonometry. He helped 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 Triangulis", in which he described much of the basic trigonometric knowledge which is now taught in high school and college, was the first great book on trigonometry to appear in print. Mention should also be made of Nicholas of Cusa (or Nicolaus Cusanus), a 15th Century German philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, whose prescient ideas on the infinite 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 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.

16TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS

The supermagic square shown in Albrecht Drer's engraving "Melencolia

The cultural, intellectual I" 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 bookkeeping 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 things.

During the 16th and early 17th Century, the equals, multiplication, division, radical (root), decimal and inequality symbols were gradually introduced and standardized. The use of decimal fractions and decimal arithmetic is usually attributed to the Flemish mathematician Simon Stevin the late 16th Century, although the decimal point notation was not popularized 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. In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in Basic mathematical notation, with dates of first use particular was famed for its intense public mathematics competitions. It was in just such a competion that the unlikely figure of the young, self-taughtNiccol Fontana Tartaglia revealed to the world the 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 ofChina, India and the Islamic world. Building on Tartaglias work, another young Italian, Lodovico Ferrari, soon devised a similar method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x4) and both solutions were 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 Bologna resident, Rafael Bombelli, to explain what imaginary numbers really were and how they could be used).Tartaglia went on to produce other important (although largely ignored) formulas and methods, and Cardanopublished perhaps the first systematic treatment of probability.

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.

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.

Logarithms were invented by John Napier, early in the 17th Century

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 log10 100 or lg 100 or just log 100) is 2, because 102 = 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 gobetween 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 (22-1), 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, Graph of the number of digits in the known Mersenne primes Mersennes real connection with the numbers was only to compile a none-tooaccurate 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 2 671 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 perspective theorem 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. Newtonprobably 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 forerunner to the computer and the use of matrices to solve linear equations. 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 are inverse operations, and he also made complete translations of Euclid into Latin and English.

18TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS

Most of the late 17th Century and a good part of the early 18th were taken up by the work of disciples of Newtonand Leibniz, who applied their ideas on calculus to solving a variety of problems in physics, astronomy and engineering. The period was dominated, though, by one family, the Bernoullis of Basel in Switzerland, which boasted two or three generations of exceptional mathematicians, particularly the brothers, Jacob and Johann. They were largely responsible for further developingLeibnizs Calculus of variations infinitesimal calculus paricularly through the generalization and extension of calculus known as the "calculus of variations" - as well asPascal and Fermats probability and number theory. Basel was also the home town of the greatest of the 18th Century mathematicians, Leonhard Euler, although, partly due to the difficulties in getting on in a city dominated by theBernoulli family, Euler spent most of his time abroad, in Germany and St. Petersburg, Russia. He excelled in all aspects of mathematics, from geometry to calculus to trigonometry to algebra to number theory, and was able to find unexpected links between the different fields. He proved numerous theorems, pioneered new methods, standardized mathematical notation and wrote many influential textbooks throughout his long academic life. In a letter to Euler in 1742, the German mathematician Christian Goldbach proposed the Goldbach Conjecture, which states that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes (e.g. 4 = 2 + 2; 8 = 3 + 5; 14 = 3 + 11 = 7 + 7; etc) or, in another equivalent version, every integer greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three primes. Yet another version is the so-called weak Goldbach Conjecture, that all odd numbers greater than 7 are the sum of three odd primes. They remain among the oldest unsolved problems in number theory (and in all of mathematics), although the weak form of the conjecture appears to be closer to resolution than the strong one. Goldbach also proved other theorems in number theory such as the Goldbach-Euler Theorem on perfect powers.

Despite Eulers and the Bernoullis dominance of 18th Century mathematics, many of the other important mathematicians were from France. In the early part of the century, Abraham de Moivre is perhaps best known for de Moivre's formula, (cosx + isinx)n = cos(nx) + isin(nx), which links complex numbers and trigonometry. But he also generalized Newtons famous binomial theorem into the multinomial theorem, pioneered the development of analytic geometry, and his work on the normal distribution (he gave the first statement of the formula for the normal distribution curve) and probability theory were of great importance. France became even more prominent towards the end of the century, and a handful of late 18th Century French mathematicians in particular deserve mention at this point, beginning with the three Ls. Joseph Louis Lagrange collaborated with Euler in an important joint work on the calculus of variation, but he also contributed to differential equations and number theory, and he is usually credited with originating the theory of groups, which would become so important in 19th and 20th Century mathematics. His name is given an early theorem in group theory, which states that the number of elements of every sub-group of a finite group divides evenly into the number of elements of the original finite group. Lagrange is also credited with the four-square theorem, that any natural number can be represented as the sum of four squares (e.g. 3 = 12 + 12 + 12 + 02; 31 = 52 + 22 + 12 + 12; 310 = 172 + 42 + 22 + 12; etc), as well as another theorem, confusingly also known as Lagranges Theorem or Lagranges Mean Value Theorem, which states that, given a section of a smooth continuous (differentiable) curve, there is at least one point on that section at which the Lagranges Mean value Theorem derivative (or slope) of the curve is equal (or parallel) to the average (or mean) derivative of the section. Lagranges 1788 treatise on analytical mechanics offered the most comprehensive treatment of classical mechanics since Newton, and formed a basis for the development of mathematical physics in the 19th Century. Pierre-Simon Laplace, sometimes referred to as the French Newton, was an important mathematician and astronomer, whose monumental work Celestial Mechanics translated the geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on

calculus, opening up a much broader range of problems. Although his early work was mainly on differential equations and finite differences, he was already starting to think about the mathematical and philosophical concepts of probability and statistics in the 1770s, and he developed his own version of the so-called Bayesian interpretation of probability independently of Thomas Bayes. Laplace is well known for his belief in complete scientific determinism, and he maintained that there should be a set of scientific laws that would allow us - at least in principle - to predict everything about the universe and how it works. Adrien-Marie Legendre also made important contributions to statistics, number theory, abstract algebra and mathematical analysis in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, athough much of his work (such as the least squares method for curve-fitting and linear regression, the quadratic reciprocity law, the prime number theorem and his work on elliptic functions) was only brought to perfection - or at least to general notice - by others, particularlyGauss. The first six Legendre polynomials (solutions to Legendres differential His Elements of equation) Geometry, a re-working of Euclids book, became the leading geometry textbook for almost 100 years, and his extremely accurate measurement of the terrestrial meridian inspired the creation, and almost universal adoption, of the metric system of measures and weights. Yet another Frenchman, Gaspard Monge was the inventor of descriptive geometry, a clever method of representing three-dimensional objects by projections on the twodimensional plane using a specific set of procedures, a technique which would later become important in the fields of engineering, architecture and design. His orthographic projection became the graphical method used in almost all modern mechanical drawing. After many centuries of increasingly accurate approximations, Johann Lambert, a Swiss mathematician and prominent astronomer, finally provided a rigorous proof in 1761 that is irrational, i.e. it can not be expressed as a simple fraction using integers only or as a terminating or repeating decimal. This definitively proved that it would never be possible to calculate it exactly, although the obsession with obtaining more and more accurate approximations continues to this day. (Over a hundred years later, in 1882, Ferdinand von Lindemann would prove that is also

transcendental, i.e. it cannot be the root of any polynomial equation with rational coefficients). Lambert was also the first to introduce hyperbolic functions into trigonometry and made some prescient conjectures regarding non-Euclidean space and the properties of hyperbolic triangles.

19TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS

The 19th Century saw an unprecedented increase in the breadth and complexity of mathematical concepts. Both France and Germany were caught up in the age of revolution which swept Europe in the late 18th Century, but the two countries treated mathematics quite differently. After the French Revolution, Napoleon emphasized the practical usefulness of mathematics and his reforms and military ambitions gave French mathematics a big boost, as exemplified by the three Ls, Lagrange, Laplace and Legendre (see the section on 18th Century Mathematics), Fourier and Galois.

Approximation of a periodic function by the Fourier Series

Joseph Fourier's study, at the beginning of the 19th Century, of infinite sums in which the terms are trigonometric functions were another important advance in mathematical analysis. Periodic functions that can be expressed as the sum of an infinite series of sines and cosines are known today as Fourier Series, and they are still powerful tools in pure and applied mathematics. Fourier (following Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange and others) also contributed towards defining exactly what is meant by a function, although the definition that is found in texts today - defining it in terms of a correspondence between elements of the domain and the range - is usually attributed to the 19th Century German mathematician Peter Dirichlet. In 1806, Jean-Robert Argand published his paper on how complex numbers (of the form a + bi, where i is -1) could be represented on geometric diagrams and manipulated using trigonometry and vectors. Even though the Dane Caspar Wessel had produced a very similar paper at the end of the 18th Century, and even though it

was Gauss who popularized the practice, they are still known today as Argand Diagrams. The Frenchman variste Galois proved in the late 1820s that there is no general algebraic method for solving polynomial equations of any degree greater than four, going further than the Norwegian Niels Henrik Abel who had, just a few years earlier, shown the impossibility of solving quintic equations, and breaching an impasse which had existed for centuries. Galois' work also laid the groundwork for further developments such as the beginnings of the field of abstract algebra, including areas like algebraic geometry, group theory, rings, fields, modules, vector spaces and noncommutative algebra. Germany, on the other hand, under the influence of the great educationalist Wilhelm von Humboldt, took a rather different approach, supporting pure mathematics for its own sake, detached from the demands of the state and military. It was in this environment that the young German prodigy Carl Friedrich Gauss, sometimes called the Prince of Mathematics, received his education at the prestigious University of Gttingen. Some ofGauss ideas were a hundred years ahead of their time, and touched on many different parts of the mathematical world, including geometry, number theory, calculus, algebra and probability. He is widely regarded as one of the three greatest mathematicians of all times, along with Archimedes and Newt on. Later in life, Gauss also claimed to have investigated a kind of nonEuclidean geometry using curved space but, unwilling to court controversy, he Euclidean, hyperbolic and elliptic geometry decided not to pursue or publish any of these avantgarde ideas. This left the field open for Jnos Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevsky (respectively, a Hungarian and a Russian) who both independently explored the potential of hyperbolic geometry and curved spaces. The German Bernhard Riemann worked on a different kind of non-Euclidean geometry called elliptic geometry, as well as on a generalized theory of all the different types of geometry. Riemann, however, soon took this even further, breaking away completely from all the limitations of 2 and 3 dimensional geometry, whether flat or curved, and began to think in higher dimensions. His exploration of the zeta function in multi-dimensional complex numbers revealed an unexpected link with the distribution of prime numbers, and his famous Riemann Hypothesis, still unproven after 150 years, remains one of the worlds great unsolved mathematical mysteries and the testing ground for new generations of mathematicians.

British mathematics also saw something of a resurgence in the early and mid-19th century. Although the roots of the computer go back to the geared calculators of Pascal and Leibniz in the 17th Century, it was Charles Babbage in 19th Century England who designed a machine that could automatically perform computations based on a program of instructions stored on cards or tape. His large "difference engine" of 1823 was able to calculate logarithms and trigonometric functions, and was the true forerunner of the modern electronic computer. Although never actually built in his lifetime, a machine was built almost 200 years later to his specifications and worked perfectly. He also designed a much more sophisticated machine he called the "analytic engine", complete with punched cards, printer and computational abilities commensurate with modern computers. Another 19th Century Englishman, George Peacock, is usually credited with the invention of symbolic algebra, and the extension of the scope of algebra beyond the ordinary systems of numbers. This recognition of the possible existence of nonarithmetical algebras was an important stepping stone toward future developments in abstract algebra. In the mid-19th Century, the British mathematician George Boole devised an algebra (now called Boolean algebra or Boolean logic), in which the only operators were AND, OR and NOT, and which could be applied to the solution of logical problems and mathematical functions. He also described a kind of binary system which used just two objects, "on" and "off" (or "true" and "false", 0 and 1, etc), in which, famously, 1 + 1 = 1. Boolean algebra was the starting point of modern mathematical logic and ultimately led to the development of computer science. The concept of number and algebra was further extended by the Irish mathematician William Hamilton, whose 1843 theory of quaternions (a 4dimensional number system, where a quantity representing a 3dimensional rotation can be described by just an angle and a vector). Quaternions, and its later generalization by Hermann Grassmann, provided the first example of a noncommutative algebra (i.e. one in which a x b does not always equal bx a), and showed that several different consistent algebras may be derived

Hamiltons quaternion

by choosing different sets of axioms. The Englishman Arthur Cayley extended Hamilton's quaternions and developed the octonions. But Cayley was one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, and was a pioneer of modern group theory, matrix algebra, the theory of higher singularities, and higher dimensional geometry (anticipating the later ideas of Klein), as well as the theory of invariants. Throughout the 19th Century, mathematics in general became ever more complex and abstract. But it also saw a re-visiting of some older methods and an emphasis on mathematical rigour. In the first decades of the century, the Bohemian priest Bernhard Bolzano was one of the earliest mathematicians to begin instilling rigour into mathematical analysis, as well as giving the first purely analytic proof of both the fundamental theorem of algebra and the intermediate value theorem, and early consideration of sets (collections of objects defined by a common property, such as "all the numbers greater than 7" or "all right triangles", etc). When the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass discovered the theoretical existence of a continuous function having no derivative (in other words, a continuous curve possessing no tangent at any of its points), he saw the need for a rigorous arithmetization of calculus, from which all the basic concepts of analysis could be derived. Along with Riemann and, particularly, the Frenchman Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Weierstrass completely reformulated calculus in an even more rigorous fashion, leading to the development of mathematical analysis, a branch of pure mathematics largely concerned with the notion of limits (whether it be the limit of a sequence or the limit of a function) and with the theories of differentiation, integration, infinite series and analytic functions. In 1845, Cauchy also proved Cauchy's theorem, a fundamental theorem of group theory, which he discovered while examining permutation groups. Carl Jacobi also made important contributions to analysis, determinants and matrices, and especially his theory of periodic functions and elliptic functions and their relation to the elliptic theta function.

August Ferdinand Mbius is best known for his 1858 discovery of the Mbius strip, a non-orientable twodimensional surface which has only one side when embedded in threedimensional Euclidean space (actually a German, Johann Benedict Listing, devised the same object just a couple of months before Mbius, but it has come to hold Mbius' name). Many other concepts are also named after him, including the Mbius configuration, Mbius transformations, the Mbius transform of number theory, the Mbius function and the Mbius inversion formula. He also introduced homogeneous coordinates and discussed geometric and projective transformations.

Non-orientable surfaces with no identifiable "inner" and "outer" sides

Felix Klein also pursued more developments in non-Euclidean geometry, include the Klein bottle, a one-sided closed surface which cannot be embedded in threedimensional Euclidean space, only in four or more dimensions. It can be best visualized as a cylinder looped back through itself to join with its other end from the "inside". Kleins 1872 Erlangen Program, which classified geometries by their underlying symmetry groups (or their groups of transformations), was a hugely influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the day, and his work was very important in the later development of group theory and function theory. The Norwegian mathematician Marius Sophus Lie also applied algebra to the study of geometry. He largely created the theory of continuous symmetry, and applied it to the geometric theory of differential equations by means of continuous groups of transformations known as Lie groups. In an unusual occurrence in 1866, an unknown 16-year old Italian, Niccol Paganini, discovered the second smallest pair of amicable numbers (1,184 and 1210), which had been completely overlooked by some of the greatest mathematicians in history (including Euler, who had identified over 60 such numbers in the 18th Century, some of them huge). In the later 19th Century, Georg Cantor established the first foundations of set theory, which enabled the rigorous treatment of the notion of infinity, and which has

since become the common language of nearly all mathematics. In the face of fierce resistance from most of his contemporaries and his own battle against mental illness, Cantor explored new mathematical worlds where there were many different infinities, some of which were larger than others. Cantors work on set theory was extended by another German, Richard Dedekind, who defined concepts such as similar sets and infinite sets. Dedekind also came up with the notion, now called a Dedekind cut which is now a standard definition of the real numbers. He showed that any irrational Venn diagram number divides the rational numbers into two classes or sets, the upper class being strictly greater than all the members of the other lower class. Thus, every location on the number line continuum contains either a rational or an irrational number, with no empty locations, gaps or discontinuities. In 1881, the Englishman John Venn introduced his Venn diagrams which become useful and ubiquitous tools in set theory. Building on Riemanns deep ideas on the distribution of prime numbers, the year 1896 saw two independent proofs of the asymptotic law of the distribution of prime numbers (known as the Prime Number Theorem), one by Jacques Hadamard and one by Charles de la Valle Poussin, which showed that the number of primes occurring up to any number x is asymptotic to (or tends towards) xlog x.

Hermann Minkowski, a great friend ofDavid Hilbert and teacher of the young Albert Einstein, developed a branch of number theory called the "geometry of numbers" late in the 19th Century as a geometrical method in multi-dimensional space for solving number theory problems, involving complex concepts such as convex sets, lattice points and vector space. Later, in 1907, it was Minkowski who realized that the Einsteins 1905 special theory of relativity could be best understood in a fourdimensional space, often referred to as Minkowski space-time.

Minkowski space-time

Gottlob Freges 1879 Begriffsschrift (roughly translated as Concept-Script) broke new ground in the field of logic, including a rigorous treatment of the ideas of functions and variables. In his attempt to show that mathematics grows out of logic, he devised techniques that took him far beyond the logical traditions of Aristotle (and even of George Boole). He was the first to explicitly introduce the notion of variables in logical statements, as well as the notions of quantifiers, universals and existentials. He extended Boole's "propositional logic" into a new "predicate logic" and, in so doing, set the stage for the radical advances of Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russelland David Hilbert in the early 20th Century. Henri Poincar came to prominence in the latter part of the 19th Century with at least a partial solution to the three body problem, a deceptively simple problem which had stubbornly resisted resolution since the time ofNewton, over two hundred years earlier. Although his solution actually proved to be erroneous, its implications led to the early intimations of what would later become known as chaos theory. In between his important work in theoretical physics, he also greatly extended the theory of mathematical topology, leaving behind a knotty problem known as the Poincar conjecture which remined unsolved until 2002. Poincar was also an engineer and a polymath, and perhaps the last of the great mathematicians to adhere to an older conception of mathematics, which championed a faith in human intuition over rigour and formalism. He is sometimes referred to as the Last Univeralist as he was perhaps the last mathematician able to shine in almost all of the various aspects of what had become by now a huge, encyclopedic and incredibly complex subject. The 20th Century would belong to the specialists.

20TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS

The 20th Century continued the trend of the 19th towards increasing generalization and abstraction in mathematics, in which the notion of axioms as selfevident truths was largely discarded in favour of an emphasis on such logical concepts as consistency and completeness. It also saw mathematics become a major profession, involving thousands of new Ph.D.s each year and jobs in both teaching and industry, and the development of hundreds of specialized areas and fields of study, such as group theory, knot theory, sheaf theory, Fields of Mathematics topology, graph theory, functional analysis, singularity theory, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, model theory, category theory, game theory, complexity theory and many more. The eccentric British mathematicianG.H. Hardy and his young Indian protg Srinivasa Ramanujan, were just two of the great mathematicians of the early 20th Century who applied themselves in earnest to solving problems of the previous century, such as the Riemann hypothesis. Although they came close, they too were defeated by that most intractable of problems, but Hardy is credited with reforming British mathematics, which had sunk to something of a low ebb at that time, and Ramanujan proved himself to be one of the most brilliant (if somewhat undisciplined and unstable) minds of the century. Others followed techniques dating back millennia but taken to a 20th Century level of complexity. In 1904, Johann Gustav Hermes completed his construction of a regular polygon with 65,537 sides (216 + 1), using just a compass and straight edge as Euclid would have done, a feat that took him over ten years. The early 20th Century also saw the beginnings of the rise of the field of mathematical logic, building on the earlier advances of Gottlob Frege, which came to fruition in the hands of Giuseppe Peano, L.E.J. Brouwer,David Hilbert and,

particularly, Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead, whose monumental joint work the Principia Mathematica was so influential in mathematical and philosophical logicism. The century began with a historic convention at the Sorbonne in Paris in the summer of 1900 which is largely remembered for a lecture by the young German mathematician David Hilbert in which he set out what he saw as the 23 greatest unsolved mathematical problems of the day. These Hilbert problems effectively set the agenda for 20th Century mathematics, and laid down the gauntlet for Part of the transcript of Hilberts 1900 Paris lecture, in which he set out his generations of 23 problems mathematicians to come. Of these original 23 problems, 10 have now been solved, 7 are partially solved, and 2 (the Riemann hypothesis and the Kronecker-Weber theorem on abelian extensions) are still open, with the remaining 4 being too loosely formulated to be stated as solved or not. Hilbert was himself a brilliant mathematician, responsible for several theorems and some entirely new mathematical concepts, as well as overseeing the development of what amounted to a whole new style of abstract mathematical thinking. Hilbert's approach signalled the shift to the modern axiomatic method, where axioms are not taken to be self-evident truths. He was unfailingly optimistic about the future of mathematics, famously declaring in a 1930 radio interview We must know. We will know!, and was a well-loved leader of the mathematical community during the first part of the century. However, the Austrian Kurt Gdel was soon to put some very severe constraints on what could and could not be solved, and turned mathematics on its head with his famous incompleteness theorem, which proved the unthinkable - that there could be solutions to mathematical problems which were true but which could never be proved. Alan Turing, perhaps best known for his war-time work in breaking the German enigma code, spent his pre-war years trying to clarify and simplify Gdels rather abstract proof. His methods led to some conclusions that were perhaps even more devastating than Gdels, including the idea that there was no way of telling beforehand which problems were provable and which unprovable. But, as a spin-off,

his work also led to the development of computers and the first considerations of such concepts as artificial intelligence. With the gradual and wilful destruction of the mathematics community of Germany and Austria by the anti-Jewish Nazi regime in the 1930 and 1940s, the focus of world mathematics moved to America, particularly to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which attempted to reproduce the collegiate atmosphere of the old European universities in rural New Jersey. Many of the brightest European mathematicians, including Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, Kurt Gdel and Albert Einstein, fled the Nazis to this safe haven. John von Neumann is considered one of the foremost mathematicians in modern history, another mathematical child prodigy who went on to make major contributions to a vast range of fields. In addition to his physical work in quantum theory and his role in the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear physics and the hydrogen bomb, he is particularly remembered as a pioneer of game theory, and particularly for his design model for a storedprogram digital computer that uses a processing unit and a separate storage Von Neumanns computer architecture design structure to hold both instructions and data, a general architecture that most electronic computers follow even today. Andr Weil was another refugee from the war in Europe, after narrowly avoiding death on a couple of occasions. His theorems, which allowed connections to be made between number theory, algebra, geometry and topology, are considered among the greatest achievements of modern mathematics. He was also responsible for setting up a group of French mathematicians who, under the secret nom-deplume of Nicolas Bourbaki, wrote many influential books on the mathematics of the 20th Century. Perhaps the greatest heir to Weils legacy was Alexander Grothendieck, a charismatic and beloved figure in 20th Century French mathematics. Grothendieck was a structuralist, interested in the hidden structures beneath all mathematics, and

in the 1950s he created a powerful new language which enabled mathematical structures to be seen in a new way, thus allowing new solutions in number theory, geometry, even in fundamental physics. His theory of schemes allowed certain of Weil's number theory conjectures to be solved, and his theory of topoi is highly relevant to mathematical logic. In addition, he gave an algebraic proof of the Riemann-Roch theorem, and provided an algebraic definition of the fundamental group of a curve. Although, after the 1960s, Grothendieck all but abandoned mathematics for radical politics, his achievements in algebraic geometry have fundamentally transformed the mathematical landscape, perhaps no less than those of Cantor, Gdel and Hilbert, and he is considered by some to be one of the dominant figures of the whole of 20th Century mathematics. Paul Erds was another inspired but distinctly non-establishment figure of 20th Century mathematics. The immensely prolific and famously eccentric Hungarian mathematician worked with hundreds of different collaborators on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. As a humorous tribute, an "Erds number" is given to mathematicians according to their collaborative proximity to him. He was also known for offering small prizes for solutions to various unresolved problems (such as the Erds conjecture on arithmetic progressions), some of which are still active after his death. The field of complex dynamics (which is defined by the iteration of functions on complex number spaces) was developed by two Frenchmen, Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia, early in the 20th Century. But it only really gained much attention in the 1970s and 1980s with the beautiful computer plottings of Julia sets and, particularly, of the Mandelbrot sets of yet another French mathematician, Benot Mandelbrot. Julia and Mandelbrot fractals are The Mandelbrot set, the most famous example of a fractal closely related, and it was Mandelbrot who coined the term fractal, and who became known as the father of fractal geometry. The Mandelbrot set involves repeated iterations of complex quadratic polynomial equations of the form zn+1 =zn2 + c, (where z is a number in the complex plane of the form x + iy). The iterations produce a form of feedback based on recursion, in which smaller parts exhibit approximate reduced-size copies of the whole, and which are

infinitely complex (so that, however much one zooms in and magifies a part, it exhibits just as much complexity). Paul Cohen is an example of a second generation Jewish immigrant who followed the American dream to fame and success. His work rocked the mathematical world in the 1960s, when he proved that Cantor's continuum hypothesis about the possible sizes of infinite sets (one of Hilberts original 23 problems) could be both true AND not true, and that there were effectively two completely separate but valid mathematical worlds, one in which the continuum hypothesis was true and one where it was not. Since this result, all modern mathematical proofs must insert a statement declaring whether or not the result depends on the continuum hypothesis. Another of Hilberts problems was finally resolved in 1970, when the young Russian Yuri Matiyasevich finally proved that Hilberts tenth problem was impossible, i.e. that there is no general method for determining when polynomial equations have a solution in whole numbers. In arriving at his proof, Matiyasevich built on decades of work by the American mathematician Julia Robinson, in a great show of internationalism at the height of the Cold War. In additon to complex dynamics, another field that benefitted greatly from the advent of the electronic computer, and particulary from its ability to carry out a huge number of repeated iterations of simple mathematical formulas which would be impractical to do by hand, was chaos theory. Chaos theory tells us that some systems seem to exhibit random behaviour even though they are not random at all, and conversely some systems may have roughly predictable behaviour but are fundamentally unpredictable in any detail. The possible behaviours that a chaotic system may have can also be mapped graphically, and it was discovered that these mappings, known as "strange attractors", are fractal in nature (the more you zoom in, the more detail can be seen, although the overall pattern remains the same). An early pioneer in modern chaos theory was Edward Lorenz, whose interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction. Lorenz's discovery came in 1961, when a computer model he had been running was actually saved using three-digit numbers rather than the six digits he had been working with, and this tiny rounding error produced dramatically different results. He discovered that small changes in initial conditions can produce large changes in the long-term outcome - a phenomenon he described by the term butterfly effect - and he demonstrated this with his Lorenz attractor, a fractal structure corresponding to the behaviour of the Lorenz oscillator (a 3-dimensional dynamical system that exhibits chaotic flow).

1976 saw a proof of the four colour theorem by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. The four colour conjecture was first proposed in 1852 by Francis Guthrie (a student of Augustus De Morgan), and states that, in any given separation of a plane into contiguous regions (called a map) the regions can be coloured using at most four colours so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour. One proof Example of a four-colour map was given by Alfred Kempe in 1879, but it was shown to be incorrect by Percy Heawood in 1890 in proving the five colour theorem. The eventual proof that only four colours suffice turned out to be significantly harder. Appel and Hakens solution required some 1,200 hours of computer time to examine around 1,500 configurations. Also in the 1970s, origami became recognized as a serious mathematical method, in some cases more powerful than Euclidean geometry. In 1936, Margherita Piazzola Beloch had shown how a length of paper could be folded to give the cube root of its length, but it was not until 1980 that an origami method was used to solve the "doubling the cube" problem which had defeated ancient Greek geometers. An origami proof of the equally intractible "trisecting the angle" problem followed in 1986. The Japanese origami expert Kazuo Haga has at least three mathematical theorems to his name, and his unconventional folding techniques have demonstrated many unexpected geometrical results. The British mathematician Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermats Last Theorem for ALL numbers in 1995, some 350 years after Fermats initial posing. It was an achievement Wiles had set his sights on early in life and pursued doggedly for many years. In reality, though, it was a joint effort of several steps involving many mathematicans over several years, including Goro Shimura, Yutaka Taniyama, Gerhard Frey, Jean-Pierre Serre and Ken Ribet, with Wiles providing the links and the final synthesis and, specifically, the final proof of the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves. The proof itself is over 100 pages long. The most recent of the great conjectures to be proved was the Poincar Conjecture, which was solved in 2002 (over 100 years after Poincar first posed it) by the eccentric and reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman. However, Perelman, who lives a frugal life with his mother in a suburb of St. Petersburg, turned

down the $1 million prize, claiming that "if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed". The conjecture, now a theorem, states that, if a loop in connected, finite boundaryless 3-dimensional space can be continuously tightened to a point, in the same way as a loop drawn on a 2-dimensional sphere can, then the space is a three-dimensional sphere. Perelman provided an elegant but extremely complex solution involving the ways in which 3-dimensional shapes can be wrapped up in even higher dimensions. Perelman has also made landmark contributions to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology. John Nash, the American economist and mathematician whose battle against paranoid schizophrenia has recently been popularized by the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind, did some important work in game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations which have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life, such as in market economics, computing, artificial intelligence, accounting and military theory. The Englishman John Horton Conway established the rules for the so-called "Game of Life" in 1970, an early example of a "cellular automaton" in which patterns of cells evolve and grow in a gridm which became extremely popular among computer scientists. He has made important contributions to many branches of pure mathematics, such as game theory, group theory, number theory and geometry, and has also come up with some wonderful-sounding concepts like surreal numbers, the grand antiprism and monstrous moonshine, as well as mathematical games such as Sprouts, Philosopher's Football and the Soma Cube. Other mathematics-based recreational puzzles became even more popular among the general public, including Rubik's Cube (1974) and Sudoku (1980), both of which developed into full-blown crazes on a scale only previously seen with the 19th Century fads of Tangrams (1817) and the Fifteen puzzle (1879). In their turn, they generated attention from serious mathematicians interested in exploring the theoretical limits and underpinnings of the games. Computers continue to aid in the identification of phenomena such as Mersenne primes numbers (a prime number that is one less than a power of two - see the section on 17th Century Mathematics). In 1952, an early computer known as SWAC identified 2257-1 as the 13th Mersenne prime number, the first new one to be found in 75 years, before going on to identify several more even larger.

With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available computer software to search for Mersenne primes, has led to another leap in the discovery rate. Currently, the 13 largest Mersenne primes were all discovered in this way, and the largest (the 45th Mersenne prime number and also the largest known prime number of any kind) was discovered in 2009 and contains nearly 13 million digits. The search also continues for ever more Approximations for accurate computer approximations for the irrational number , with the current record standing at over 5 trillion decimal places. The P versus NP problem, introduced in 1971 by the American-Canadian Stephen Cook, is a major unsolved problem in computer science and the burgeoning field of complexity theory, and is another of the Clay Mathematics Institute's million dollar Millennium Prize problems. At its simplest, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be efficiently checked by a computer can also be efficiently solved by a computer (or put another way, whether questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked, but which require an impossibly long time to solve by any direct procedure). The solution to this simple enough sounding problem, usually known as Cook's Theorem or the Cook-Levin Theorem, has eluded mathematicians and computer scientists for 40 years. A possible solution by Vinay Deolalikar in 2010, claiming to prove that P is not equal to NP (and thus such insolulable-but-easilychecked problems do exist), has attracted much attention but has not as yet been fully accepted by the computer science community.

LIST OF IMPORTANT MATHEMATICIANS

This is a chronological list of some of the most important mathematicians in history and their major achievments, as well as some very early achievements in mathematics for which individual contributions can not be acknowledged. Where the mathematicians have individual pages in this website, these pages are linked; otherwise more information can usually be obtained from the general page relating to the particular period in history, or from the list of sources used. A more

detailed and comprehensive mathematical chronology can be found athttp://wwwgroups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Chronology/full.html.

Date 35000 BC 3100 BC 2700 BC 2600 BC 20001800 BC 18001600 BC 1650 BC 1200 BC 1200900 BC 800400 BC 650 BC 624546 BC 570495 BC 500 Thales Name Nationality African Major Achievements First notched tally bones

Sumerian

Earliest documented counting and measuring system

Egyptian

Earliest fully-developed base 10 number system in use

Sumerian

Multiplication tables, geometrical exercises and division problems Earliest papyri showing numeration system and basic arithmetic

Egyptian

Babylonian

Clay tablets dealing with fractions, algebra and equations

Egyptian

Rhind Papyrus (instruction manual in arithmetic, geometry, unit fractions, etc) First decimal numeration system with place value concept

Chinese

Indian

Early Vedic mantras invoke powers of ten from a hundred all the way up to a trillion

Indian

Sulba Sutra lists several Pythagorean triples and simplified Pythagorean theorem for the sides of a square and a rectangle, quite accurate approximation to 2 Lo Shu order three (3 x 3) magic square in which each row, column and diagonal sums to 15 Early developments in geometry, including work on similar and right triangles

Chinese

Greek

Pythagoras

Greek

Expansion of geometry, rigorous approach building from first principles, square and triangular numbers, Pythagoras theorem Discovered potential existence of irrational numbers while

Hippasus

Greek

BC 490430 BC 470410 BC 460370 BC 428348 BC 410355 BC 384322 BC 300 BC Zeno of Elea Greek

trying to calculate the value of 2 Describes a series of paradoxes concerning infinity and infinitesimals

Hippocrates of Chios

Greek

First systematic compilation of geometrical knowledge, Lune of Hippocrates

Democritus

Greek

Developments in geometry and fractions, volume of a cone

Plato

Greek

Platonic solids, statement of the Three Classical Problems, influential teacher and popularizer of mathematics, insistence on rigorous proof and logical methods Method for rigorously proving statements about areas and volumes by successive approximations

Eudoxus of Cnidus

Greek

Aristotle

Greek

Development and standardization of logic (although not then considered part of mathematics) and deductive reasoning

Euclid

Greek

Definitive statement of classical (Euclidean) geometry, use of axioms and postulates, many formulas, proofs and theorems including Euclids Theorem on infinitude of primes Formulas for areas of regular shapes, method of exhaustion for approximating areas and value of , comparison of infinities

287212 BC 276195 BC 262190 BC 200 BC

Archimedes

Greek

Eratosthenes

Greek

Sieve of Eratosthenes method for identifying prime numbers

Apollonius of Perga

Greek

Work on geometry, especially on cones and conic sections (ellipse, parabola, hyperbola)

Chinese

Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, including guide to how to solve equations using sophisticated matrix-based methods Develop first detailed trigonometry tables

190120 BC 36 BC

Hipparchus

Greek

Mayan

Pre-classic Mayans developed the concept of zero by at least

this time 10-70 AD Heron (or Hero) Greek of Alexandria Greek/Egyptian Herons Formula for finding the area of a triangle from its side lengths, Herons Method for iteratively computing a square root Develop even more detailed trigonometry tables

90-168 Ptolemy AD 200 AD 200 AD 200284 AD 220280 AD Diophantus Sun Tzu

Chinese

First definitive statement of Chinese Remainder Theorem

Indian

Refined and perfected decimal place value number system

Greek

Diophantine Analysis of complex algebraic problems, to find rational solutions to equations with several unknowns

Liu Hui

Chinese

Solved linear equations using a matrices (similar to Gaussian elimination), leaving roots unevaluated, calculated value of correct to five decimal places, early forms of integral and differential calculus Surya Siddhanta contains roots of modern trigonometry, including first real use of sines, cosines, inverse sines, tangents and secants Definitions of trigonometric functions, complete and accurate sine and versine tables, solutions to simultaneous quadratic equations, accurate approximation for (and recognition that is an irrational number) Basic mathematical rules for dealing with zero (+, - and x), negative numbers, negative roots of quadratic equations, solution of quadratic equations with two unknowns First to write numbers in Hindu-Arabic decimal system with a circle for zero, remarkably accurate approximation of the sine function Advocacy of the Hindu numerals 1 - 9 and 0 in Islamic world, foundations of modern algebra, including algebraic methods of reduction and balancing, solution of polynomial equations up to second degree Continued Archimedes' investigations of areas and volumes, tangents to a circle

400 AD

Indian

476550 AD

Aryabhata

Indian

598668 AD 600680 AD 780850 AD

Brahmagupta

Indian

Bhaskara I

Indian

Muhammad Al- Persian Khwarizmi

908946 AD 9531029

Ibrahim ibn Sinan

Arabic

Muhammad Al- Persian Karaji

First use of proof by mathematical induction, including to prove the binomial theorem

AD 9661059 AD 10481131 Ibn al-Haytham Persian/Arabic (Alhazen) Derived a formula for the sum of fourth powers using a readily generalizable method, Alhazen's problem, established beginnings of link between algebra and geometry Generalized Indian methods for extracting square and cube roots to include fourth, fifth and higher roots, noted existence of different sorts of cubic equations Established that dividing by zero yields infinity, found solutions to quadratic, cubic and quartic equations (including negative and irrational solutions) and to second order Diophantine equations, introduced some preliminary concepts of calculus Fibonacci Sequence of numbers, advocacy of the use of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in Europe, Fibonacci's identity (product of two sums of two squares is itself a sum of two squares) Developed field of spherical trigonometry, formulated law of sines for plane triangles Solutions to quadratic, cubic and higher power equations using a method of repeated approximations Culmination of Chinese magic squares, circles and triangles, Yang Huis Triangle (earlier version of Pascals Triangle of binomial co-efficients) Applied theory of conic sections to solve optical problems, explored amicable numbers, factorization and combinatorial methods Use of infinite series of fractions to give an exact formula for , sine formula and other trigonometric functions, important step towards development of calculus System of rectangular coordinates, such as for a time-speeddistance graph, first to use fractional exponents, also worked on infinite series Influential book on arithmetic, geometry and book-keeping, also introduced standard symbols for plus and minus Formula for solving all types of cubic equations, involving first real use of complex numbers (combinations of real and imaginary numbers), Tartaglias Triangle (earlier version of Pascals Triangle) Published solution of cubic and quartic equations (by Tartaglia

Omar Khayyam Persian

11141185

Bhaskara II

Indian

11701250

Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci)

Italian

12011274 12021261 12381298

Nasir al-Din al- Persian Tusi Qin Jiushao Chinese

Yang Hui

Chinese

12671319

Kamal al-Din al-Farisi

Persian

13501425

Madhava

Indian

13231382

Nicole Oresme French

14461517 14991557

Luca Pacioli

Italian

Niccol Fontana Tartaglia

Italian

1501-

Gerolamo

Italian

1576

Cardano

and Ferrari), acknowledged existence of imaginary numbers (based on -1) Italian Devised formula for solution of quartic equations

15221565 15501617 15881648

Lodovico Ferrari John Napier

British

Invention of natural logarithms, popularized the use of the decimal point, Napiers Bones tool for lattice multiplication Clearing house for mathematical thought during 17th Century, Mersenne primes (prime numbers that are one less than a power of 2) Early development of projective geometry and point at infinity, perspective theorem Development of Cartesian coordinates and analytic geometry (synthesis of geometry and algebra), also credited with the first use of superscripts for powers or exponents Method of indivisibles paved way for the later development of infinitesimal calculus Discovered many new numbers patterns and theorems (including Little Theorem, Two-Square Thereom and Last Theorem), greatly extending knowlege of number theory, also contributed to probability theory Contributed towards development of calculus, originated idea of number line, introduced symbol for infinity, developed standard notation for powers Pioneer (with Fermat) of probability theory, Pascals Triangle of binomial coefficients Development of infinitesimal calculus (differentiation and integration), laid ground work for almost all of classical mechanics, generalized binomial theorem, infinite power series Independently developed infinitesimal calculus (his calculus notation is still used), also practical calculating machine using binary system (forerunner of the computer), solved linear equations using a matrix Helped to consolidate infinitesimal calculus, developed a technique for solving separable differential equations, added a theory of permutations and combinations to probability theory, Bernoulli Numbers sequence, transcendental curves Further developed infinitesimal calculus, including the calculus of variation, functions for curve of fastest descent

Marin Mersenne

French

15911661 15961650

Girard Desargues Ren Descartes

French

French

15981647 16011665

Bonaventura Cavalieri Pierre de Fermat

Italian

French

16161703

John Wallis

British

16231662 16431727

Blaise Pascal

French

Isaac Newton

British

16461716

Gottfried Leibniz

German

16541705

Jacob Bernoulli Swiss

16671748

Johann Bernoulli

Swiss

(brachistochrone) and catenary curve 16671754 Abraham de Moivre French De Moivre's formula, development of analytic geometry, first statement of the formula for the normal distribution curve, probability theory Goldbach Conjecture, Goldbach-Euler Theorem on perfect powers Made important contributions in almost all fields and found unexpected links between different fields, proved numerous theorems, pioneered new methods, standardized mathematical notation and wrote many influential textbooks Rigorous proof that is irrational, introduced hyperbolic functions into trigonometry, made conjectures on nonEuclidean space and hyperbolic triangles Comprehensive treatment of classical and celestial mechanics, calculus of variations, Lagranges theorem of finite groups, four-square theorem, mean value theorem Inventor of descriptive geometry, orthographic projection

16901764 17071783

Christian Goldbach

German

Leonhard Euler Swiss

17281777

Johann Lambert

Swiss

17361813

Joseph Louis Lagrange

Italian/French

17461818 17491827

Gaspard Monge Pierre-Simon Laplace

French

French

Celestial mechanics translated geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, Bayesian interpretation of probability, belief in scientific determinism Abstract algebra, mathematical analysis, least squares method for curve-fitting and linear regression, quadratic reciprocity law, prime number theorem, elliptic functions Studied periodic functions and infinite sums in which the terms are trigonometric functions (Fourier series) Pattern in occurrence of prime numbers, construction of heptadecagon, Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, exposition of complex numbers, least squares approximation method, Gaussian distribution, Gaussian function, Gaussian error curve, non-Euclidean geometry, Gaussian curvature Early pioneer of mathematical analysis, reformulated and proved theorems of calculus in a rigorous manner, Cauchy's theorem (a fundamental theorem of group theory) Mbius strip (a two-dimensional surface with only one side), Mbius configuration, Mbius transformations, Mbius transform (number theory), Mbius function, Mbius inversion formula

17521833

Adrien-Marie Legendre

French

17681830 17771825

Joseph Fourier French

Carl Friedrich Gauss

German

17891857

Augustin-Louis French Cauchy

17901868

August Ferdinand Mbius

German

17911858 17911871

George Peacock Charles Babbage

British

Inventor of symbolic algebra (early attempt to place algebra on a strictly logical basis) Designed a "difference engine" that could automatically perform computations based on instructions stored on cards or tape, forerunner of programmable computer. Developed theory of hyperbolic geometry and curved spaces independendly of Bolyai Proved impossibility of solving quintic equations, group theory, abelian groups, abelian categories, abelian variety Explored hyperbolic geometry and curved spaces independently of Lobachevsky Important contributions to analysis, theory of periodic and elliptic functions, determinants and matrices Theory of quaternions (first example of a non-commutative algebra) Proved that there is no general algebraic method for solving polynomial equations of degree greater than four, laid groundwork for abstract algebra, Galois theory, group theory, ring theory, etc Devised Boolean algebra (using operators AND, OR and NOT), starting point of modern mathematical logic, led to the development of computer science Discovered a continuous function with no derivative, advancements in calculus of variations, reformulated calculus in a more rigorous fashion, pioneer in development of mathematical analysis Pioneer of modern group theory, matrix algebra, theory of higher singularities, theory of invariants, higher dimensional geometry, extended Hamilton's quaternions to create octonions Non-Euclidean elliptic geometry, Riemann surfaces, Riemannian geometry (differential geometry in multiple dimensions), complex manifold theory, zeta function, Riemann Hypothesis Defined some important concepts of set theory such as similar sets and infinite sets, proposed Dedekind cut (now a standard definition of the real numbers) Introduced Venn diagrams into set theory (now a ubiquitous

British

17921856 18021829 18021860 18041851 18051865 18111832

Nikolai Lobachevsky Niels Henrik Abel Jnos Bolyai

Russian

Norwegian

Hungarian

Carl Jacobi

German

William Hamilton

Irish

variste Galois French

18151864

George Boole

British

18151897

Karl Weierstrass

German

18211895

Arthur Cayley

British

18261866

Bernhard Riemann

German

18311916

Richard Dedekind

German

1834-

John Venn

British

1923 18421899 18451918 Marius Sophus Norwegian Lie Georg Cantor German

tool in probability, logic and statistics) Applied algebra to geometric theory of differential equations, continuous symmetry, Lie groups of transformations Creator of set theory, rigorous treatment of the notion of infinity and transfinite numbers, Cantor's theorem (which implies the existence of an infinity of infinities) One of the founders of modern logic, first rigorous treatment of the ideas of functions and variables in logic, major contributor to study of the foundations of mathematics Klein bottle (a one-sided closed surface in four-dimensional space), Erlangen Program to classify geometries by their underlying symmetry groups, work on group theory and function theory Partial solution to three body problem, foundations of modern chaos theory, extended theory of mathematical topology, Poincar conjecture Peano axioms for natural numbers, developer of mathematical logic and set theory notation, contributed to modern method of mathematical induction Co-wrote Principia Mathematica (attempt to ground mathematics on logic) 23 Hilbert problems, finiteness theorem, Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem), Hilbert space, developed modern axiomatic approach to mathematics, formalism Geometry of numbers (geometrical method in multidimensional space for solving number theory problems), Minkowski space-time Russells paradox, co-wrote Principia Mathematica (attempt to ground mathematics on logic), theory of types Progress toward solving Riemann hypothesis (proved infinitely many zeroes on the critical line), encouraged new tradition of pure mathematics in Britain, taxicab numbers Pioneer in field of complex analytic dynamics, investigated iterative and recursive processes Proved several theorems marking breakthroughs in topology (including fixed point theorem and topological invariance of dimension)

18481925

Gottlob Frege

German

18491925

Felix Klein

German

18541912

Henri Poincar French

18581932

Giuseppe Peano

Italian

18611947 18621943

Alfred North Whitehead David Hilbert

British

German

18641909

Hermann Minkowski

German

18721970 18771947

Bertrand Russell G.H. Hardy

British

British

18781929 18811966

Pierre Fatou

French

L.E.J. Brouwer Dutch

18871920

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Indian

Proved over 3,000 theorems, identities and equations, including on highly composite numbers, partition function and its asymptotics, and mock theta functions Developed complex dynamics, Julia set formula

18931978 19031957 19061978

Gaston Julia

French

John von Neumann Kurt Gdel

Hungarian/ American Austria

Pioneer of game theory, design model for modern computer architecture, work in quantum and nuclear physics Incompleteness theorems (there can be solutions to mathematical problems which are true but which can never be proved), Gdel numbering, logic and set theory Theorems allowed connections between algebraic geometry and number theory, Weil conjectures (partial proof of Riemann hypothesis for local zeta functions), founding member of influential Bourbaki group Breaking of the German enigma code, Turing machine (logical forerunner of computer), Turing test of artificial intelligence Set and solved many problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory and probability theory Pioneer in modern chaos theory, Lorenz attractor, fractals, Lorenz oscillator, coined term butterfly effect Work on decision problems and Hilbert's tenth problem, Robinson hypothesis Mandelbrot set fractal, computer plottings of Mandelbrot and Julia sets Mathematical structuralist, revolutionary advances in algebraic geometry, theory of schemes, contributions to algebraic topology, number theory, category theory, etc Work in game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations, provided insight into complex systems in daily life such as economics, computing and military Proved that continuum hypothesis could be both true and not true (i.e. independent from Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory) Important contributions to game theory, group theory, number theory, geometry and (especially) recreational mathematics, notably with the invention of the cellular automaton called the "Game of Life"

19061998

Andr Weil

French

19121954 19131996

Alan Turing

British

Paul Erds

Hungarian

19172008 19191985 19242010 1928-

Edward Lorenz American

Julia Robinson American

Benot Mandelbrot Alexander Grothendieck

French

French

1928-

John Nash

American

19342007 1937-

Paul Cohen

American

John Horton Conway

British

1947-

Yuri Matiyasevich

Russian

Final proof that Hilberts tenth problem is impossible (there is no general method for determining whether Diophantine equations have a solution) Finally proved Fermats Last Theorem for all numbers (by proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture for semistable elliptic curves) Finally proved Poincar Conjecture (by proving Thurston's geometrization conjecture), contributions to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology

1953-

Andrew Wiles

British

1966-

Grigori Perelman

Russian