16TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS

The Supermagic Square

The famed German artist Albrecht Dürer included an

order-4 magic square in his engraving “Melencolia I” so-
called “super magic square” with many more lines of
addition symmetry than a regular 4 x 4 magic square. The
year of the work, 1514, is shown in the two bottom central
squares.

Italian Franciscan friar called Luca Pacioli, who published

a book on arithmetic, geometry and book-keeping at the
end of the 15th Century which became quite popular for
the mathematical puzzles it contained. It also introduced
symbols for plus and minus for the first time in a printed
book (although this is also sometimes attributed to Giel
Vander Hoecke, Johannes Widmann and others), symbols
that were to become standard notation. He also
investigated the Golden Ratio of 1 : 1.618… 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. Stevin was
ahead of his time in enjoining that all types of
numbers, whether fractions, negatives, real
numbers or surds (such as ) should be treated
equally as numbers in their own right.

In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century,

Bologna University was famed for its intense
public mathematics competitions. It was in just
such a competion that Niccolò Fontana
Tartaglia revealed to the world the formula for
solving first one type, and later all types, of cubic
equations.
Basic Mathematical Notation with dates of first use
Lodovico Ferrari, devised a similar method to
solve quartic equations 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 number. Cardano published perhaps the first systematic treatment of
probability.
 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
Kepler’s formulation of mathematical laws
of planetary motion.

The invention of the logarithm in the early

17th Century by John Napier (and later
improved by Napier and Henry Briggs)
contributed to the advance of science,
astronomy and mathematics by making some difficult calculations relatively easy. It was one
of the most significant mathematical developments of the age, and 17th Century physicists like
Kepler and Newton could never have performed the complex calculatons needed for their
innovations without it. The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace
remarked, almost two centuries later, that Napier, by halving the labours of astronomers, had
doubled their lifetimes.

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.

The Frenchman Marin Mersenne is largely

remembered in mathematics today in the
term Mersenne primes – prime numbers that
are one less than a power of 2.

The Frenchman René 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.

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 Pascal’s Triangle of binomial coefficients.
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 French mathematician and engineer Girard

Desargues is considered one of the founders of
the field of projective geometry. 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.

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 Desargues’ Perspective Theorem
two main operations, differentiation and
integration. Newton probably developed his work before Leibniz, but Leibniz published his first,
leading to an extended and rancorous dispute. Whatever the truth behind the various claims,
though, it is Leibniz’s 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 Newton’s contributions to a generalized binomial theorem, the theory of finite
differences and the use of infinite power series, and Leibniz’s 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 Newton and 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 Bernoulli’s of Basel in Switzerland, particularly
the brothers, Jacob and Johann. They were largely
responsible for further developing Leibniz’s
infinitesimal calculus – particularly through the
generalization and extension of calculus known as
the “calculus of variations” – as well
as Pascal and Fermat’s probability and number theory.

Leonhard 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. He also proved other theorems in number theory such as the
Goldbach-Euler Theorem on perfect powers.

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 Newton’s
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 L’s”.

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’s Mean value Theorem

Lagrange is also credited with the four-
square theorem, that any natural number
can be represented as the sum of four
squares, as well as another theorem,
confusingly also known as Lagrange’s
Theorem or Lagrange’s Mean Value Theorem
Lagrange’s 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”, whose Lagrange’s Mean value Theorem
monumental work “Celestial Mechanics”
translated the geometric study of classical
mechanics to one based on calculus. 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.

The first six Legendre polynomials

Adrien-Marie Legendre also made
important contributions to
statistics, number theory, abstract
algebra and mathematical analysis
in the late 18th and early 19th
Centuries. His “Elements of
Geometry”, a re-working of Euclid’s
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.

Another Frenchman, Gaspard

Monge was the inventor of The first six Legendre polynomials (solutions to
descriptive geometry, a clever Legendre’s differential equation)
method of representing three-
dimensional objects by projections on the two-dimensional 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 π is
irrational, i.e. it can not be expressed as a simple fraction using integers only or as a
terminating or repeating decimal. (Over a hundred years later, in 1882, Ferdinand von
Lindemann would prove that π 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.