Famous Mathematicians
Copernicus
Descartes
Fibonacci
Galileo
Kepler
Hypatia
Pythagoras (582 - 507 BC)
Pythagoras was a philosopher, astronomer, geometrician and mathematician. He was founder of the Pythagorean school or brotherhood. Its members took an oath to keep the teachings secret and to hold the same beliefs. Members of the brotherhood were concerned with relationships between whole numbers and felt they were mystical.
Pythagoras discovered the amicable or friendly numbers. Numbers are amicable if each is the sum of the proper divisors of the other e.g 284 and 220. There are more than 900 pairs of amicable numbers.
Probably the best known mathematical formula is credited to Pythagoras. The Pythagoras' Theorem relates the sum of the squares of the two shorter sides of a right angled triangle to the square of the hypotenuse.
In astronomy he taught that the Earth was a sphere located at the centre of a spherical universe.
Euclid (300 BC) |
Euclid was a mathematician in Alexandria in Egypt. He is famous for work called the "Elements". This became the most famous and influential set of text books in the world for many centuries and was an introductory text book covering all of the elementary mathematics known at that time. It covered the work on proportion by Eodoxus and the geometry of Pythagoras. The "Elements" consisted of 13 books covering such topics as quadratic equations and the construction of the five regular solids and of their circumscribed spheres. Euclid was the first Mathematical Principal at the Museum of Alexandria where he taught for many years. His work laid the foundation for the studies of such mathematicians as, Eratosthenes and Apollonius.
The Euclidean Algorithm
The highest Common factor of two numbers may be found by this method.
Find the HCF of 99 and 15
1) Divide the largest number by the smaller number and note the remainder.
99 ÷ 15 = 6 remainder 9
2) Divide the smaller number by the remainder and note the new remainder.
15 ÷ 9 = 1 remainder 6
3 Divide the first remainder by the second remainder, repeating this step until
the remainder is zero. The last non-zero remainder is the highest common factor.
9 ÷ 6 = 1 remainder 3
6 ÷ 3 = 2 remainder 0
Therefore 3 is the highest common factor (last non-zero remainder)
Archimedes (287 - 212 BC) |
Archimedes is regarded as the greatest of the earlier mathematicians and one of the greatest of all times. He estimated the area of a circle by drawing a polygon outside the circle and a similar polygon inside the circle (inscribed and circumscribed) and saying that the area of the circle must lie between the areas of the two polygons. The more sides the polygon has the more accurate the answer. He tried this with polygons of up to 96 sides. This approach was the forerunner of integral calculus discovered many centuries later. He was thus able to find a more accurate value of pi. He discovered the formulas for the surface area and volume of a sphere, the surface area of cylinders, the area of parabolic segments and spirals. He also did work involving statics and hydrostatics and he determined the ratio of the volume of a sphere to that of its enclosing circle is 2 : 3. The monument placed over his tomb in Syracuse where he was born and died was in the sculptured form of a sphere enclosed by a cylinder.
Eratosthenes (276 BC - 194 BC) |
Sieve of Eratosthenes
About 200 BC Eratosthenes devised an orderly method for sifting prime numbers.
1 Cross out 1 (it is not a prime)
2 Circle 2 (prime) and then cross out all the multiple of 2
3 Circle 3 (the next prime) and cross out all the multiple of 3
4 Repeat this process to sieve out all composite numbers
The circled numbers are the primes
Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (85 - 165 AD) |
A Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer who was born in Egypt. His theory of the Universe held that the earth was the centre of the Solar system. This view was held until the time of Copernicus and Galileo. He worked out pi as 3.1416. This was in the days before calculators and computers. He gathered together all of the work that had been done on trigonometry up to that time and much of the nomenclature and symbols we use in trigonometry today were developed by Ptolemy. He was responsible for the development of the symbol for degrees (°) and minutes (') when measuring angles.
Hypatia (370- 415 AD) |
Hypatia lived and worked in Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile river, at the time it was the centre of Greek intellectual life. Ptolemy founded a university there, and to staff it he invited scholars from all over the world. Euclid the famous Greek mathematician was head of the mathematics department. Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, a noted mathematician and astronomer. She lectured on mechanics, mathematics philosophy and astronomy and built instruments such as the astrolabe for measuring the position of the stars. She also wrote a book called "On the Conics of Apollonius" about the conic sections, curves such as the parabola, the ellipse and the hyperbola, which had fascinated her Greek ancestors. She is also thought to have written a book about the work of Diophantus one of the earliest students of algebra. Hypatia was murdered, the victim of a power struggle between two Alexandrian leaders, a Christian and a Roman. One legend says that her flesh was scraped from her bones using oyster shells.
Al-Khowarizmi (783 - 840 AD) |
Al-Khowarizmi was born in Uzbekistan. His full name was Abu-Abdullah Mohammed ibn Mus Al-Khowarizmi. He lived most of his life in Baghdad in Iraq. That part of the world was on all the major trade routes and was considered a centre of learning and many mathematical ideas were discussed and passed on there. Al-Khowarizmi recognised the usefulness of the Hindu-Arabic number system, the decimal system on which our present day numbers are based. He wrote a book on place-value and on topics such as astronomy and geography. He is best known for his work on solving equations and he developed the method of applying operations to both sides of an equation. His book on this systematic approach to algebra was the first of its kind and was used for centuries and used in many countries and became known as Al-jabr and eventually "Algebra".
Fibonacci (1175 - 1250) |
Fibonacci was born in Pisa on the north coast of Africa. His father was a businessman and Leonardo received a Moorish education as well as a European one. He was widely travelled around the Mediterranean and met with many different systems of arithmetic and number. Europe was still using the Roman and Greek alphabet for numbers and the abacus still had to be used for calculations. Fibonacci helped to introduce the Hindu-Arabic number system. He showed by examples the superiority of these numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 over the Roman equivalent. He is also accredited with being the first person to use a bar for fractions to separate the numerator and denominator. He was also interested in sequences and series and the famous Fibonacci series was demonstrated in a problem involving rabbits. This concerns a pair of rabbits which breed every 2 months....how many pairs of rabbits can be reproduced from that pair in a year, if each month, each pair, reaching the age of 2 months, reproduces another pair. This gives rise to the sequence :1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21... where each term is the sum of the two previous ones.
Nicholas Copernicus (1473 - 1543) |
Polish astronomer, born at Torun. He was brought up by his uncle, a Catholic bishop. He studied mathematics at Cracow, law at Bologna and medicine at Padua, but after returning to his uncles palace in 1507 he spent most of his time studying the stars. At this time it was generally believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe -- a theory put forward by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (about AD 130). Copernicus' of the sun, moon and planets led him first to question this theory, then to reject it completely. By 1530 he had reached the conclusion that makes him the father of modern astronomy: that the Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun. *
Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) |
Italian astronomer, mathematician and physicist. While a medical student in his home town of Pisa, he discovered the value of the pendulum as an exact measure of time. Later he carried out experiments with bodies in motion and discovered that objects with different weights fall at the same speed. He invented a basic thermometer, a proportional compass and the first astronomical telescope. Galileo's observations observations of the stars convinced him that Copernicus was right in believing the Sun was the centre of the universe.
He wrote a book in support of this theory, which was bitterly opposed by the Church. In 1633, he was tried by the Inquisition and forced to deny the theory. *
He wrote a book in support of this theory, which was bitterly opposed by the Church. In 1633, he was tried by the Inquisition and forced to deny the theory. *
Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630) |
Kepler was born at Weil in Germany. He studied at the University of Tubingen and then became a maths teacher at Graz. He studied astronomy, and developed his laws of elliptical orbits. Kepler bridged the gap between geometry and astrology. His conception of the Solar System ascribed elliptical orbits to the planets with the sun as a common focus. Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion were :
1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse .
2. The line from the sun to the planets sweeps over equal areas in equal times.
3. The square of the period taken to revolve around the sun is directly proportional to the cube of the planet's mean distance from the sun. He published many books including one on the gauging of the volume of wine casks! His influence in the evolution of the calculus was considerable, making great use of the logarithms of John Napier.
Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) |
Renee Descartes was born near Tours in France. He revolutionised mathematical concepts and ushered in modern mathematics. He was a philosopher and a modest man who declared toward the end of his brilliant life, that he had always felt like a boy playing by the seashore, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. On leaving school he joined the world of the Parisian wealthy and later the army when he fought in the Thiry Years War. His spare time was spent studying mathematics and he was also interested in a new invention of the time, the telescope. He went to Holland to escape the distractions of Paris and find time to meditate and search for truth. In 1637 he published a book outlining his views on philosophy and first mentioned his coordinate system for geometry, now known as the Cartesian system. He went to Sweden in 1649, and died soon after of pneumonia.
In 1637 Rene Descartes was the first person to use the superscript notation for raising numbers and variables to powers
eg x2
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) |
American (German Born) physicist whose discoveries, notably the theory of relativity, won him the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922. Einstein revolutionised physics by showing that its laws are the laws of geometry in four dimensions, and that these laws, in turn, are determined by the distribution of matter and energy in the universe. *