INDIAN MATHEMATICS & MATHEMATICIANS

Mantras from the early Vedic period (before

1000 BCE) invoke powers of ten 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 CE 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 10421. Given that there
are an estimated 1080 atoms in the whole
The Evolution of Hindu-Arabic Numerals 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 BCE, 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 + 1⁄3 + 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 BCE, 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 CE. 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 mathematicians) we use across the world today, sometimes considered one
of the greatest intellectual innovations of all time.

Earliest Recorded Usage of a Circle Character as Number Zero

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 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 The earliest use of a circle character for the
mathematicians Brahmagupta – or possibly another number zero was in India

Indian, Bhaskara I.

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.

Golden Age Indian mathematicians made

fundamental advances in the theory of
trigonometry. 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 heavens.

Indian astronomers used trigonometry to

calculate the relative distances between
the Earth and the Moon and the Earth Indian Astronomers used trigonometry to
and the Sun. They realized that, when the
estimate the relative distance of the Earth to 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 1⁄7°. 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.

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 CE,
contains the roots of modern trigonometry, including the first real use of sines, cosines,
inverse sines, tangents and secants.

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. He also demonstrated solutions to simultaneous quadratic equations, and
produced an approximation for the value of π 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 π is an irrational number, and that any calculation can only ever be an
approximation, something not proved in Europe until 1761.

Infinity as the Reciprocal of Zero

Bhaskara II, who lived in the 12th Century, was one of the
most accomplished of all India’s 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 ÷ 1⁄2 = 2. Similarly, 1 ÷ 1⁄3 = 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).

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.

Madhava of Sangamagrama, sometimes called the greatest mathematician-astronomer of

medieval India. He developed infinite series approximations for a range of trigonometric
functions, including π, 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.
 ISLAMIC MATHEMATICS
The Islamic Empire 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 complex geometric patterns to decorate
their buildings, raising mathematics to the form
of an art.

The House of Wisdom was set up in Baghdad

around 810, and work started almost
immediately on translating the
Some complex symmetries used in Islamic major Greek and Indian mathematical and
Temple decoration astronomy works into Arabic.

The outstanding Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi was an early Director of the
House of Wisdom in the 9th Century. 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 he introduced the fundamental algebraic

methods of “reduction” and “balancing” and provided an exhaustive account of solving
polynomial equations up to the second degree.

The 10th Century Persian mathematician Muhammad Al-Karaji introduced the theory of
algebraic calculus. Al-Karaji was the first to use the method of proof by mathematical
induction to prove his results.

Binomial Theorem

Al-Karaji used mathematical induction to prove the

binomial theorem. A binomial is a simple type of
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.

Omar Khayyam 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.

Spherical Trigonometry

The 13th Century Persian astronomer, scientist and

mathematician Nasir Al-Din Al-Tusi was perhaps the first to
treat trigonometry as a separate mathematical discipline,
distinct from astronomy. 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

Al-Tusi was a pioneer in the field

of Spherical Trigonometry
mathematical contributions was the formulation of the famous law of sines for 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 73⁄8);
 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
the Chinese, Indian and Islamic mathematicians 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 Centuries, all trade and calculation

was made using the clumsy and
inefficient Roman numeral system, and with an abacus based on Greek and Roman models.

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 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.

Europe’s first great medieval mathematician was the Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better known by
his nickname Fibonacci. He is 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.

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 René
Descartes popularized the idea. 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 1⁄1 + 1⁄2 + 1⁄3 + 1⁄4 + 1⁄5… is a
divergent infinite series (i.e. not tending to a limit, other than
infinity).

The German scholar Regiomontatus was perhaps the most

capable mathematician of the 15th Century. 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 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.

The Supermagic Square

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 “super magic 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
Basic mathematical notation, with dates of
the world the formula for solving first one
first use
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.

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. Logarithms were invented by John Napier,
It was one of the most significant early in the 17th Century
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
go-between 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,
Mersenne’s real connection with the
numbers was only to compile a none-too-
accurate list of the smaller ones (when
Edouard Lucas devised a method of
checking them in the 19th Century, he Graph of the number of digits in the known
pointed out that Mersenne had incorrectly Mersenne primes
included 267-1 and left out 261-1, 289-1 and
2107-1 from his list).

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.

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 Pascal’s 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
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. Desargues’ perspective theorem

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. 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, which boasted two or
three generations of exceptional
mathematicians, particularly the
brothers, Jacob and Johann. They
were largely responsible for further
developing Leibniz’s infinitesimal
calculus – paricularly through the
generalization and extension of
calculus known as the “calculus of Calculus of variations
variations” – as well
as Pascal and Fermat’s 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
the Bernoulli 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 Euler’s 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 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 (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 Lagrange’s Theorem or Lagrange’s 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 derivative
(or slope) of the curve is equal (or parallel)
to the average (or mean) derivative of the
section. Lagrange’s 1788 treatise on
analytical mechanics offered the most Lagrange’s Mean value Theorem
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.

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, 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,
particularly Gauss. His “Elements
of Geometry”, a re-working
of Euclid’s book, became the
leading geometry textbook for The first six Legendre polynomials (solutions to
almost 100 years, and his Legendre’s differential equation)
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 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. 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 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.

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 L’s”,
Lagrange, Laplace and Legendre (see the
section on 18th Century Mathematics),
Fourier and Galois.

Joseph Fourier’s study, at the beginning of Approximation of a periodic function by the

the 19th Century, of infinite sums in which Fourier Series
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 Évariste 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 non-commutative 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 Göttingen. Some of Gauss’ 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 Newton.

Later in life, Gauss also

claimed to have
investigated a kind of non-
Euclidean geometry using
curved space but, unwilling
to court controversy, he
decided not to pursue or
publish any of these avant-
garde ideas. This left the
field open for János
Bolyai and Nikolai Euclidean, hyperbolic and elliptic geometry
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 world’s 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 non-arithmetical 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 4-
dimensional number
system, where a quantity
representing a 3-
dimensional 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 non-commutative
algebra (i.e. one in
which a x b does not always
equal b x a), and showed
that several different
consistent algebras may be
derived by choosing Hamilton’s quaternion
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 Möbius is
best known for
his 1858 discovery of the
Möbius strip, a non-
orientable two-dimensional
surface which has only one
side when embedded in
three-dimensional
Euclidean space (actually a
German, Johann Benedict
Listing, devised the same
object just a couple of
months before Möbius, but
it has come to hold Möbius’
name). Many other
concepts are also named
after him, including the
Möbius configuration,
Möbius transformations,
the Möbius transform of
number theory, the Möbius
function and the Möbius
inversion formula. He also
introduced homogeneous
coordinates and discussed
geometric and projective Non-orientable surfaces with no identifiable “inner” and
transformations. “outer” sides

Felix Klein also pursued more developments in non-Euclidean geometry, include the Klein
bottle, a one-sided closed surface that cannot be embedded in three-dimensional 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”. Klein’s 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, Niccolò 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.
Cantor’s 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
number divides the rational
numbers into two classes
or sets, the upper class Venn diagram
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 Riemann’s 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 Vallée Poussin,
which showed that the number of primes occurring up to any number x is asymptotic to (or
tends towards) x⁄log x.

Hermann Minkowski, a
great friend of David
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 Einstein’s
1905 special theory of
relativity could be best
understood in a four-
dimensional space, often
referred to as Minkowski
space-time. Minkowski space-time

Gottlob Frege’s 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 Russell and David Hilbert in the early 20th Century.
Henri Poincaré 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 of Newton, 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 Poincaré conjecture which remined unsolved until 2002.

Poincaré 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 “self-evident
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,
topology, graph theory,
functional analysis,
singularity theory,
catastrophe theory, chaos Fields of Mathematics
theory, model theory,
category theory, game theory, complexity theory and many more.

The eccentric British mathematician G.H. Hardy and his young Indian protégé 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 generations
of mathematicians to come. Part of the transcript of Hilbert’s 1900 Paris lecture, in which
Of these original 23 he set out his 23 problems
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 Gödel 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 Gödel’s rather abstract proof. His
methods led to some conclusions that were perhaps even more devastating than Gödel’s,
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 Gödel and Albert Einstein, fled the Nazis to this safe haven.

Emmy Noether, a German Jew who was also forced out of Germany by the Nazi regime, was
considered by many (including Albert Einstein) to be the most important woman in the history
of mathematics. Her work in the 1920s and 1930s changed the face of abstract algebra, and she
made important contributions in the fields of algebraic invariants, commutative rings, number
fields, non-commutative algebra, and hypercomplex numbers. Noether’s theorem on the
connection between symmetry and conservation laws was key in the development of quantum
mechanics and other aspects of modern physics.

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 stored-
program digital computer
that uses a processing unit
and a separate storage
structure to hold both
instructions and data, a
Von Neumann’s computer architecture design
general architecture that
most electronic computers follow even today.

Another American, Claude Shannon, has become known as the father of information theory,
and he, von Neumann and Alan Turing between them effectively kick-started the computer and
digital revolution of the 20th Century. His early work on Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic
resulted in his foundation of digital circuit design in 1937 and a more robust exposition of
communication and information theory in 1948. He also made important contributions in
cryptography, natural language processing and sampling theory.

The Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov is usually credited with laying the modern
axiomatic foundations of probability theory in the 1930s, and he established a reputation as the
world’s leading expert in this field. He also made important contributions to the fields of
topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory
and computational complexity.

André 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-de-plume of Nicolas Bourbaki, wrote many
influential books on the mathematics of the 20th Century.

Perhaps the greatest heir to Weil’s 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, Gödel and Hilbert, and he is
considered by some to be one of the dominant figures of the whole of 20th Century
mathematics.

Paul Erdös 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 “Erdös 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 Erdös 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, Benoît
Mandelbrot. Julia and
Mandelbrot fractals are
closely related, and it was
Mandelbrot who coined the The Mandelbrot set, the most famous example of a fractal
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 Hilbert’s 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 Hilbert’s problems was finally resolved in 1970, when the young Russian Yuri
Matiyasevich finally proved that Hilbert’s 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 was given
by Alfred Kempe in 1879,
but it was shown to be Example of a four-colour map
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 Haken’s 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 Fermat’s Last Theorem for ALL
numbers in 1995, some 350 years after Fermat’s 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 mathematicians 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 Poincaré Conjecture, which was
solved in 2002 (over 100 years after Poincaré first posed it) by the eccentric and reclusive
Russian mathematician Grigori man. 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 grid, 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
accurate computer Approximations for π
approximations for the
irrational number π, 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-easily-checked problems do
exist), has attracted much attention but has not as yet been fully accepted by the computer
science community.

The Chinese-born American mathematician, Yitang Zhang, working in the area of number
theory, achieved perhaps the most significant result since Perelman, when he provided a proof
of the first finite bound on gaps between prime numbers in 2013.