History of Mathematics

After 1700
HPS391 / MAT391
Lindsey Shorser ( lshorser@math.toronto.edu )

Week 1
 Leonhard Euler
(1707 - 1783)
• born 15 April 1707 in Basel, Switzerland

• started University at 13 years old

• studied under Johann Bernoulli who helped him get a job in St.
Petersburg, Russia in 1727 (age 20)

• worked on cartography and shipbuilding to appear useful to the

Russian state under Empress Anna

• published in mathematics at the same time

• became famous when he solved the famous Basel Problem,

something that Jacob Bernoulli and Gottfried Leibniz had been
unable to do
• popularized the symbol pi for the constant 3.141592....

• solved the Bridges of Königsberg problem, inventing

modern graph theory in the process

• generalized the Basel problem to re-writing 1/xn for any

real n in "Various Observations About Infinite Series"

• In 1741, Euler took a position at the Academy of

Sciences in Berlin where he stayed through the Seven
Year's War, all the way until 1766 when he went back to
St. Petersburg under Catherine the Great where his
religious beliefs would be welcomed (Calvinist)
• Euler's formula for simple flat-sided shapes: V - E + F = 2 for convex
polyhedra and the Euler Characteristic: χ = V - E + F (graph theory)
(topology - invented based on Cauchy’s and L’Huilier generalizations)

• also contributed to physics, engineering, music theory,

• had an excellent memory which served him well as he slowly went

blind over a number of years and made some of greatest discoveries
after the fact

• In 1771, he lost sight in his one working eye and his house burned
down. His wife died two years later and then two of his daughters

• continued to write on optics, algebra, hydrodynamics, integral

calculus, insurance, and math education

• extended functions to handle complex numbers, thereby inventing

complex analysis
The solution to the Basel Problem
 A Tale of Two Series
James Gregory (1638 - 1675)

• Sottish mathematician and astronomer

• discovered infinite series representations for a

some of the trig functions

• also stated the first, limited and geometric,

statement of the FTC in his Gerometriae Pars
Universalis (1668)
Brook Taylor (1685 - 1731)

• English mathematician

• introduced the "calculus of finite differences" in

his Directa et Inversa (1715)

• stated Taylor's Theorem in 1712, but the

remainder was later proven by Joseph-Louis
Lagrange

• an crater on the moon was named after him

Colin Maclaurin (1698 - 1746)

• a Scottish mathematician who worked in

geometry and algebra

• independently, using the same methods as

Euler, discovered the Euler-Maclaurin formula
(around 1735)

• popularized the Maclaurin Series (Taylor Series

at x=0)
• the Euler-Maclaurin formula
 Other Results Proved By
Euler
• Newton’s Identities

• Fermat’s Little Theorem

• Fermat’s Theorem on Sums of Two Squares

• he generalized Fermat’s Little Theorem using the φ

function

• Euclid-Euler Theorem: the relationship between perfect

numbers and Mersenne Primes is one-to-one

• product formula for the Riemann Zeta function

the Euler-Mascheroni constant
The Riemann
Zeta Function:

This function is
useful for:
analytic number
theory,
physics,
probability theory,
and applied statistics
 the Euler formula for converting a complex number
in polar coordinates to a complex number in Cartesian
coordinates.
Arguably Euler’s greatest discovery.
Pierre de Fermat (1607 - 1665)

• born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France

• in 1630, he bought the position of councillor at the Parlement de Toulouse,

a High Court in France, and was sworn in in 1631

• spoke French, Latin, Occitan, classical Greek, Italian, and Spanish fluently

• he mostly published letters, not papers, with little to no proofs for his claims

• explored calculus-related ideas before Newton and Leibniz

(finding max/min and tangent lines to various curves)

• worked out a technique for finding the centre of gravity of various 2-D and
3-D shapes

• communicated with Blaise Pascal to begin creation of probability theory

• used integrals to sum infinite series (used by both Newton and Leibniz when
developing calculus)

• also worked on analytic geometry, probability, number theory (Pell's equations,

perfect numbers, amicable numbers, and numbers that would later be named
after him)

• Fermat's Little Theorem was discovered while researching perfect numbers

• developed a factorization method, a technique of infinite descent (used to

prove Fermat's right triangle theorem which has, as a corollary, the n=4 case
of Fermat's Last Theorem), the two-square theorem, the polygonal number
theorem (each number is a sum of three triangular numbers, four square
numbers, five pentagonal numbers etc.), and found integer solutions to
Diophantine equations

• Fermat's last theorem was written in the margin of a copy of a mathematical

text by Diophantus (possibly written there by his son, not himself) which wasn't
proven until 1994 by Sir Andrew Wiles, using newly developed techniques
Numbers that were interesting
to Euler and Fermat:
• Perfect number: A positive number that is equal to the sum
of its proper positive divisors, excluding itself (e.g., 6)

• Mersenne prime: Prime numbers of the form 2p - 1 (e.g.,

31)

• Amicable numbers: Two different numbers so related that

the sum of the proper divisors of each is equal to the other
number (the smaller pair is 220 and 284)

• Fermat numbers: A positive integer of the form

Fn = 22^n + 1, where n is a non-negative integer (e.g., 3, 5,
17, 257, 65537, etc.)
 Fermat’s Last Theorem:
No three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation:
an + bn = cn
for any integer value of n greater than 2.