16TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS

The cultural, intellectual and artistic movement of the Renaissance,

which saw a resurgence of learning based on classical sources,
began in Italy around the 14th Century, and gradually spread across
most of Europe over the next two centuries. Science and art were
still very much interconnected and intermingled at this time, as
exemplified by the work of artist/scientists such as Leonardo da
Vinci, and it is no surprise that, just as in art, revolutionary work in
the fields of philosophy and science was soon taking place.

It is a tribute to the respect in which mathematics was held in

Renaissance Europe that the famed German artist Albrecht Dürer
included an order-4 magic square in his engraving "Melencolia I". In
fact, it is a so-called "supermagic square" with many more lines of
addition symmetry than a regular 4 x 4 magic square (see image at
right). The year of the work, 1514, is shown in the two bottom
central squares.

An important figure in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries is an

Italian Franciscan friar called Luca Pacioli, who published a book on
arithmetic, geometry and book-keeping at the end of the 15th
Century which became quite popular for the mathematical puzzles it
contained. It also introduced symbols for plus and minus for the first
time in a printed book (although this is also sometimes attributed to
Giel Vander Hoecke, Johannes Widmann and others), symbols that
were to become standard notation. Pacioli also investigated the
Golden Ratio of 1 : 1.618... (see the section on Fibonacci) in his
1509 book "The Divine Proportion", concluding that the number was
a message from God and a source of secret knowledge about the
inner beauty of 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 particular was famed for its intense public
mathematics competitions. It was in just such a competion that the
unlikely figure of the young, self-taught Niccolò 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 of China, India and the Islamic
world.

Building on Tartaglia’s 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 Cardano published 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.
II.

In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna

University in particular was famed for its intense public
mathematics competitions. It was in just such a competition, in
1535, that the unlikely figure of the young Venetian Tartaglia first
revealed a mathematical finding hitherto considered impossible,
and which had stumped the best mathematicians of China, India and
the Islamic world.

Niccolò Fontana became known as Tartaglia (meaning “the

stammerer”) for a speech defect he suffered due to an injury he
received in a battle against the invading French army. He was a poor
engineer known for designing fortifications, a surveyor of
topography (seeking the best means of defence or offence in
battles) and a bookkeeper in the Republic of Venice.

But he was also a self-taught, but wildly ambitious, mathematician.

He distinguised himself by producing, among other things, the first
Italian translations of works by Archimedes and Euclid from
uncorrupted Greek texts (for two centuries, Euclid's "Elements" had
been taught from two Latin translations taken from an Arabic
source, parts of which contained errors making them all but
unusable), as well as an acclaimed compilation of mathematics of
his own.

Tartaglia's greates legacy to mathematical history, though, occurred

when he won the 1535 Bologna University mathematics competition
by demonstrating a general algebraic formula for solving cubic
equations (equations with terms including x3), something which had
come to be seen by this time as an impossibility, requiring as it does
an understanding of the square roots of negative numbers. In the
competition, he beat Scipione del Ferro (or at least del Ferro's
assistant, Fior), who had coincidentally produced his own partial
solution to the cubic equation problem not long before. Although del
Ferro's solution perhaps predated Tartaglia’s, it was much more
limited, and Tartaglia is usually credited with the first general
solution. In the highly competitive and cut-throat environment of
16th Century Italy, Tartaglia even encoded his solution in the form
of a poem in an attempt to make it more difficult for other
mathematicians to steal it.

Tartaglia’s definitive method was, however, leaked to Gerolamo

Cardano (or Cardan), a rather eccentric and confrontational
mathematician, doctor and Renaissance man, and author
throughout his lifetime of some 131 books. Cardano published it
himself in his 1545 book "Ars Magna" (despite having promised
Tartaglia that he would not), along with the work of his own brilliant
student Lodovico Ferrari. Ferrari, on seeing Tartaglia's cubic
solution, had realized that he could use a similar method to solve
quartic equations (equations with terms including x4).

In this work, Tartaglia, Cardano and Ferrari between them

demonstrated the first uses of what are now known as complex
numbers, combinations of real and imaginary numbers of the type a
+ bi, where i is the imaginary unit √-1. It fell to another Bologna
resident, Rafael Bombelli, to explain, at the end of the 1560's,
exactly what imaginary numbers really were and how they could be
used.

Although both of the younger men were acknowledged in the

foreword of Cardano's book, as well as in several places within its
body, Tartgalia engaged Cardano in a decade-long fight over the
publication. Cardano argued that, when he happened to see (some
years after the 1535 competition) Scipione del Ferro's unpublished
independent cubic equation solution, which was dated before
Tartaglia's, he decided that his promise to Tartaglia could
legitimately be broken, and he included Tartaglia's solution in his
next publication, along with Ferrari's quartic solution.
Ferrari eventually came to understand cubic and quartic equations
much better than Tartaglia. When Ferrari challenged Tartaglia to
another public debate, Tartaglia initially accepted, but then
(perhaps wisely) decided not to show up, and Ferrari won by
default. Tartaglia was thoroughly discredited and became effectively
unemployable.

Poor Tartaglia died penniless and unknown, despite having

produced (in addition to his cubic equation solution) the first
translation of Euclid’s “Elements” in a modern European language,
formulated Tartaglia's Formula for the volume of a tetrahedron,
devised a method to obtain binomial coefficients called Tartaglia's
Triangle (an earlier version of Pascal's Triangle), and become the
first to apply mathematics to the investigation of the paths of
cannonballs (work which was later validated by Galileo's studies on
falling bodies). Even today, the solution to cubic equations is usually
known as Cardano’s Formula and not Tartgalia’s.

Ferrari, on the other hand, obtained a prestigious teaching post

while still in his teens after Cardano resigned from it and
recommended him, and was eventually able to retired young and
quite rich, despite having started out as Cardano’s servant.

Cardano himself, an accomplished gambler and chess player, wrote

a book called "Liber de ludo aleae" ("Book on Games of Chance")
when he was just 25 years old, which contains perhaps the first
systematic treatment of probability (as well as a section on effective
cheating methods). The ancient Greeks, Romans and Indians had all
been inveterate gamblers, but none of them had ever attempted to
understand randomness as being governed by mathematical laws.

The book described the - now obvious, but then revolutionary -

insight that, if a random event has several equally likely outcomes,
the chance of any individual outcome is equal to the proportion of
that outcome to all possible outcomes. The book was far ahead of
its time, though, and it remained unpublished until 1663, nearly a
century after his death. It was the only serious work on probability
until Pascal's work in the 17th Century.

Cardano was also the first to describe hypocycloids, the pointed

plane curves generated by the trace of a fixed point on a small circle
that rolls within a larger circle, and the generating circles were later
named Cardano (or Cardanic) circles.

The colourful Cardano remained notoriously short of money

thoughout his life, largely due to his gambling habits, and was
accused of heresy in 1570 after publishing a horoscope of Jesus
(apparently, his own son contributed to the prosecution, bribed by
Tartaglia).