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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MATHEMATICS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: MEDIEVAL

PERIOD

INTRODUCTION : This module presents the development of mathematics. It is

where your will learn the development of numbers in medieval period, the birth
of calculus and get in touch with some great mathematicians.

OBJECTIVES: After studying the module, you should be able to:

1. discuss the development of mathematics in the medieval and renaissance
period

2. discuss the birth of the calculus: Newton and Leibniz

3. identify the giants of mathematics in this period and discuss their contributions.

DIRECTIONS/ MODULE ORGANIZER: There are three lessons in the module. Read
each lesson carefully then answer the exercises/activities to find out how much
you have benefited from it. Work on these exercises carefully and submit your
output to your instructor. In case you encounter difficulty, discuss this with your
instructor during the face-to-face meeting. If not contact your instructor thru
online. Good luck and happy reading!!!
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Lesson 1
OVERVIEW OF MEDIEVAL PERIOD

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
endeavor 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, European knowledge and study of
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music was limited mainly to Boethius’
translations of some of the works of ancient Greek masters such as Nicomachus
and Euclid. All trade and calculation was made using the clumsy and inefficient
Roman numeral system, and with an abacus based on Greek and Roman
models.
By the 12th Century, though, Europe, and particularly Italy, was beginning
to trade with the East, and Eastern knowledge gradually began to spread to the
West. 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 great expansion of trade and commerce in general
created a growing practical need for mathematics, and arithmetic entered
much more into the lives of common people and was no longer limited to the
academic realm.

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. Although best known for the so-
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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, which soon made
the Roman numeral system obsolete, and opened the way for great advances
in European mathematics.
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, as well
as perhaps the first time-speed
distance graph. 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, his main
contribution to mathematics being in the area of trigonometry. 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.
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Leonardo of Pisa: Fibonacci (1170-1250) Fibonacci or Leonard

of Pisa, played an important role in reviving ancient
mathematics while making significant contributions of his own.
Leonardo Pisano is better known to us by his nickname
Fibonacci, which was not given him until the mid-nineteenth
century by the mathematical historian Guillaume Libri. He
played an important role in reviving ancient mathematics
and made significant contributions of his own. With his father,
Fibonacci was born in the city-state of Tuscany (now in Italy)
but was educated in North Africa where his father held a diplomatic post. He
travelled widely recognizing and the enormous advantages of the
mathematical systems used in these countries.

Leonardo Liber abbaci (Book of the Abacus), published in 1202 after his
return to Italy, is based on bits of arithmetic and algebra that Leonardo had
accumulated during his travels. The title Liber abbaci has the more general
meaning of mathematics and calculations or applied mathematics than the
literal translation of a counting machine. The mathematicians of Tuscany
following Leonardo were in fact called Maestri d Abbaco, and for more than
three centuries afterwards learned from this venerated book. Almost all that is
known of his life comes from a short biography therein, though he was
associated with the court of Frederick II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Liber abbaci introduced the Hindu-Arabic place-valued decimal
system and the use of Arabic numerals into Europe. Liber abbaci did not appear
in print until the 19th century. A problem in Liber abbaci led to the introduction
of the Fibonacci numbers and the Fibonacci sequence for which Fibonacci is
best remembered today. The Fibonacci Quarterly is a modern journal devoted
to studying mathematics related to this sequence.
Fibonacci‘s other books of major importance are Practica geometriae in
1220 containing a large collection of geometry and trigonometry. Also in Liber
quadratorum in 1225 he approximates a root of a cubic obtaining an answer
which in decimal notation is correct to 9 places.
Liber abbaci
Features of Liber abbaci include:
 a treatise on algebraic methods and problem which advocated the use of
Hindu-Arabic numerals. What is remarkable is that neither European nor Arab
businessmen use these numerals in their transactions, and when centuries later
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they caught on in Europe, it was the Europeans that taught the Arabs of their
use;
 used the horizontal bar for fractions;
 in fractions though the older systems of unit and sexagesimal were maintained;
 contained a discussion of the now-called Fibonacci Sequence –inspired by the
following problem:
How many pairs of rabbits will be produced in a year, beginning with a single
pair, if in every month each pair bears a new pair which becomes productive
from the second month on.

The sequence is given by

1, 1, 2,3,5,8,13,21,…un
Which obeys the recursion relation
Un = un-1 + un-2
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The Golden Ratio (φ) In the 1750s,

Robert Simson noted that the
ratio of each term in the
Fibonacci Sequence to the
previous term approaches, with
ever greater accuracy the
higher the terms, a ratio of
approximately 1 : 1.6180339887.
This value is referred to as the
Golden Ratio, also known as the
Golden Mean, Golden Section,
Divine Proportion, etc, and is
usually denoted by the Greek
letter Phi φ (or sometimes the
capital letter Phi ). Essentially,
two quantities are in the Golden
Ratio if the ratio of the sum of the
quantities to the larger quantity is
equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. The Golden Ratio
itself has many unique properties, such as 1 ⁄φ = φ – 1 (0.618…) and φ2 = φ + 1
(2.618…), and there are countless examples of it to be found both in nature and
in the human world.

A rectangle with sides in the ratio of 1 : φ is known as a Golden Rectangle,

and many artists and architects throughout history (dating back to ancient
Egypt and Greece, but particularly popular in the Renaissance art of Leonardo
da Vinci and his contemporaries) have proportioned their works approximately
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using the Golden Ratio and Golden Rectangles, which are widely considered to
be innately aesthetically pleasing. An arc connecting opposite points of ever
smaller nested Golden Rectangles forms a logarithmic spiral, known as a Golden
Spiral. The Golden Ratio and Golden Spiral can also be found in a surprising
number of instances in Nature, from shells to flowers to animal horns to human
bodies to storm systems to complete galaxies.
It should be remembered, though, that the Fibonacci Sequence was
actually only a very minor element in ―Liber Abaci‖ – indeed, the sequence only
received Fibonacci‘s name in 1877 when Eduouard Lucas decided to pay
tribute to him by naming the series after him – and that Fibonacci himself was
not responsible for identifying any of the interesting mathematical properties of
the sequence, its relationship to the Golden Mean and Golden Rectangles and
Spirals, etc.
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RENAISSANCE PERIOD

During the Renaissance, development of mathematics and accounting

interwove. Teaching of subjects and books published was often for children of
merchants sent to reckoning schools where they learned skills useful for trade
and commerce. Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et
Proportionalita (Review of Arithmetic, Geometry, Ratio and Proportion) was first
printed and published in Venice, 1494 AD. It included a 27 page treatise on
bookkeeping; Particularis de Computis et Scripturis (Details of Calculation and
Recording). It was primarily for merchants as a reference text, a source of
pleasure from mathematical puzzles and to aid the education of their sons. In his
book Summa Arithmetica, Pacioli introduced symbols for plus and minus that
became standard notation of Italian Renaissance mathematics. Summa
Arithmetica was the first book printed in Italy to contain algebra. Pacioli
borrowed much of the work of Piero Della Francesca.

In Italy, during the first half of the 16th century, Scipione del Ferro and
Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia discovered solutions for cubic equations. Gerolamo
Cardano published them in his book Ars Magna, 1545 AD, together with a
solution for the quartic equations (equations of the 4th degree) discovered by
his student Lodovico Ferrari. In 1572 AD, Rafael Bombelli published his L'Algebra
demonstrating perspectives with imaginary quantities that could appear in
Cardano's formula for solving cubic equations.

Simon Stevin's book, De Thiende (The Art of Tenths), first published in

Dutch, 1585 AD, contained the first systematic treatment of decimal notation
that influenced all later works on real number systems.

Driven by the demands of navigation and a growing need for accurate

maps across larger geographic areas trigonometry became an important
branch of mathematics. Regiomontanus's table of sine and cosine was
published in 1533 AD. Bartholomaeus Pitiscus was first to use the word
trigonometry in his Trigonometria, 1595 AD.

During the Renaissance the desire of artists to represent the natural world
realistically, together with the rediscovered philosophy of the Greeks, led them
to study mathematics. Many were scholars, the engineers and architects of that
time who needed mathematics. The art of painting by perspective and the
geometries required were studied intensely.
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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 Super Magic 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. 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… 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.
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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 competition
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, 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 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 formulas and methods, and
Cardano published perhaps the first systematic treatment of probability.
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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.

Niccolò Tartaglia, Gerolamo Cardano & Lodovico Ferrari

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 defense or
offence in battles) and a bookkeeper in the Republic of Venice.

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

distinguished 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 greatest 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,
something which had come to be seen by this time as 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
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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.
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 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 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
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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 Circle

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 throughout 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).
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Lesson 2
The Birth of Calculus

It is almost universally agreed upon that the two characters we encounter

in this chapter, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) are
the discoverers creators of calculus. But what do we mean by this? We know
that derivatives were already known and so was their connection with tangents
and with the extremal values of functions. In addition, the areas under curves of
varied complexity had been computed by basically doing Riemann sums
integration. Finally, the connection between the two processes of integration
and differentiation had been foreseen, and Newton had been exposed to it
from Barrow's lectures. One could say that Newton and Leibniz did understand
thoroughly the fundamental theorem of calculus, and also both appreciated
the power and range of the subject. Certainly, Newton used Calculus-type
thinking to push the frontiers of mechanics and physics.

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716)

Like Fermat, Gottfried Leibniz, was not a

mathematician by trade. He was a diplomat who
traveled widely, and as such came to meet and discuss
mathematics with all the best-known mathematicians
and scientists of his time, including Huygens and
Newton. It is, in a sense, unfortunate that Leibniz met
and corresponded with Newton, since he will, many
years after the meeting, be accused of plagiarizing his
ideas on calculus from Newton. A long, scandalous
dispute followed, and although his name was
eventually cleared, the dispute left a bitter taste in the soul of mathematicians
on both sides of the English Channel. This led to a partial isolation of English
mathematicians from those in the Continent, where calculus, and its
consequent disciplines such as differential equations, will explode into a massive
and powerful discipline. Leibniz would die unbeknownst to the world and in
relative poverty.
Leibniz developed much of our modern notation for calculus such as
dy/dx and ∫ and it is this notation (as opposed to Newton's fluxion notation) that
will be adopted in the rest of Europe.

It is fortunate, however, that Leibniz met Huygens, since it is a question

posed to him by Huygens that possibly stimulated Leibniz's discovery of the
connection between integration and differentiation.
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Huygens asked what the sum of the reciprocal of the triangular numbers
1 1 1 1
added to: 1 +3 + 6 + 10 + 15 + … =

Recall Oresme. As it turned the answer was already known, but unknown
to Leibniz, he plunged ahead into the problem. He understood that from a
given sequence: α: a1, a2, a3, a4,… , one could obtain two other ones, the
difference and the sum. The first one of these: the difference, ∆ (α), is defined as
follows, ∆ (α) b1 , b 2 , b3 ,… where: b1 = a2 - a1 , b2 = a3 – a2 , etc. Thus, for
example, if α is the sequence of triangular numbers, α: 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, …then ∆
(α) is 2, 3, 4, 5, ….
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This was very exciting to him, since he

realized he could adequately add one
sequence by simply taking differences of
another. Although certainly that reminds one of
the basic ideas behind the fundamental
theorem of calculus, it did not become real
calculus until he pushed it further, and this is
what we look at next. In the 1670's, Leibniz
discovered a general principle or technique to
evaluate areas, which he referred to as
transmutation of areas, a technique basically
equivalent to the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, which we now give in
some detail, and in, more or less, modern notation and ideology. Suppose we
have an interval and we have a function 𝑦 (𝑥) defined on this interval. We are
interested in the area under the curve of this function.

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

Born on Christmas Day, 1642, to a relatively poor
widow, Isaac Newton showed promise as a student,
and thus a brother of his mother agreed to support him
in college. He attended Cambridge University. In 1665,
during an outbreak of the plague, he was sent home,
and it was during that period that he developed some of his best ideas. Soon
after that, his teacher, Isaac Barrow resigned his position so that Newton can be
appointed to follow him. For the next 30 years Newton was a professor at
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Cambridge – alas, a terrible lecturer, hardly anyone would attend his lectures,
but a widely known scholar. In 1693, he suffered a nervous breakdown, partially
caused by the stress suffered during the dispute with Leibniz. After he recovered,
he was appointed in charge of the Royal Mint where he spent the remainder of
his life. When he died, he was the most famous scientist in the world and was
buried with all the glory and ceremony at Westminster Abbey.
Sir Isaac Newton is one of the most distinguished names in the history of
mathematics and science. He can be considered one of the founders of
modern science, and his book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
(1687) (often referred simply as the Principia) is a major book in Western
civilization.
One of his first successes, and a definite step toward calculus, was his
extension of the binomial theorem to other exponents besides positive integers.
What started as a technique to improve the computation of squared roots, and
other roots, became a broader weapon, and made him a superb manipulator
of series⎯, which was critical to his whole view of calculus.
Very often, early in our mathematical career, perhaps as early as the first
course in calculus, we get exposed to a powerful procedure for finding roots of
equations called Newton’s Method. It is more effective than the other two
methods in the Descartes section ⎯ the bisection method and the method of
false position. Its ideal name would be the tangent method (in contrast to the
secant method, a variation of the method of false position) since it finds its new
guess by following the tangent line to the function at a guess.
The method is so useful it is programmed in most hand-held calculators.
Needless to say, the method just described has been polished through time, and
we now spend some time describing what Newton originally did. He used one of
the original ideas behind calculus. That idea is ignoring terms of higher order
than 1, in other words, ignoring everything except linear terms ⎯ actually, that is
what approximating a curve by the tangent line is all about. Newton was an
expert at that technique.
After Newton and Leibniz the development of the calculus was continued
by Jacob Bernoulli and Johann Bernoulli. However when Berkeley published his
Analyst in 1734 attacking the lack of rigor in the calculus and disputing the logic
on which it was based much effort was made to tighten the reasoning.
Maclaurin attempted to put the calculus on a rigorous geometrical basis but the
really satisfactory basis for the calculus had to wait for the work of Cauchy in the
19th Century.
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Lesson 3
Euler, Fermat and Descartes

Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783)

The legacy of Leonhard Euler (pronounced "oiler") is
unsurpassed in the long history of mathematics. In both
quantity and quality, his achievements are overwhelming.
Euler's collected works fill over 70 large volumes, a
testament to the genius of this unassuming Swiss citizen
who changed the face of mathematics so profoundly.
Indeed, one's first inclination, upon encountering the
volume and quality of his work, is to regard his story as an
exaggerated piece of fiction rather than hard historical
fact.
This remarkable individual was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1707. Not
surprisingly, he showed signs of genius as a youth. Euler's father, a Calvinist
preacher, managed to work out an arrangement whereby young Leonhard
would study with the renowned Johann Bernoulli. Euler later recalled these
sessions with the master. The boy would work throughout the week and then,
during an appointed hour on Saturday afternoons, would ask Bernoulli for help
on the mathematical topics that had eluded him. Bernoulli, not always the most
kindhearted of men, may have initially shown some irritation at the shortcomings
of his pupil; Euler, for his part, resolved to work as diligently as possible so as not
to bother his mentor with unnecessary trifles.
Grumpy or not, Johann Bernoulli soon recognized the talent he was
nurturing. Soon Euler was publishing mathematical papers of high quality, and at
age 19 he won a prize from the French Academy for his brilliant analysis of the
optimum placement of masts on a ship. (It should be noted that, at this point in
his life, Euler had never even seen an ocean-going vessel!)

In 1727, Euler was appointed to the St. Petersburg Academy in Russia. At

that time, the Russian establishment was trying to implement Peter the Great's
dream of building an institution to rival the great academies of Paris and Berlin.
Among the scholars lured to Russia was Daniel Bernoulli, son of Johann, and it
was through Daniel's influence that Euler obtained his employment. Oddly, with
the positions in the natural sciences being filled, Euler's appointment was in the
areas of medicine and physiology. But a position was a position, so Euler readily
accepted. After a shaky start, including a peculiar stint as a medical officer in
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the Russian navy, Euler at last landed a mathematical chair in 1 733 when Daniel
Bernoulli, its previous occupant, vacated it to return to Switzerland.

By then, Euler had already displayed the boundless energy and enormous
creativity that would characterize his mathematical life. Although Euler began
losing sight in his right eye during the mid- 1730s and soon was virtually sightless in
that eye, this physical impairment had no impact whatever on his scientific
work. He continued unimpeded, solving significant problems from such diverse
mathematical arenas as geometry, number theory, and combinatorics, as well
as applied areas such as mechanics, hydrodynamics, and optics. It is both
poignant and somehow remarkably uplifting to imagine a man slipping into
blindness yet explaining to the world the mysteries of optical light.
In 1741 , Euler left St. Petersburg to take a position in the Berlin Academy
under Frederick the Great. This move was based in part upon his distaste for the
repressive nature of the Czarist system. Unfortunately, the Berlin situation also
proved to be far from ideal. Frederick regarded Euler as too little the
sophisticate, too much the quiet, unassuming scholar. The German king, in an
insensitive reference to Euler's vision problems, called him a "Mathematical
Cyclops." Such treatment, along with the petty controversies and political in-
fighting of the Academy, led Euler back to St. Petersburg during the reign of
Catherine the Great, and he remained there until his death 17 years later.

Euler was described by contemporaries as a kind and generous man, one

who enjoyed the simple pleasures of growing vegetables and telling stories to his
brood of 13 children. In this regard, Euler presents a welcome contrast to the
withdrawn, secretive Isaac Newton, one of his very few mathematical peers. It is
comforting to know that genius of this order does not necessarily bring with it a
neurotic personality. Euler even retained his good nature when, in 1771 , he lost
most of the vision in his normal eye . Almost totally blind and in some pain, Euler
nonetheless continued his mathematical writings unabated, by dictating his
wonderful equations and formulas to an associate. Just as deafness proved no
obstacle to Ludwig von Beethoven a generation later, so blindness did not
reduce the flow of mathematics from Leonhard Euler.
Throughout his career, Euler was blessed with a memory that can only be
called phenomenal. His number-theoretic investigations were aided by the fact
that he had memorized not only the first 100 prime numbers but also all of their
squares, their cubes, and their fourth, fifth, and sixth powers. While others were
digging through tables or pulling out pencil and paper, Euler could simply recite
from memory such quantities as 2414 or 3376. But this was the least of his
achievements. He was able to do difficult calculations mentally, some of these
 Page 20 of 37

requiring him to retain in his head up to 50 places of accuracy. The Frenchman

Francois Arago said that Euler calculated without apparent effort, "just as men
breathe, as eagles sustain themselves in the air." Yet this extraordinary mind still
had room for a vast collection of memorized facts, orations, and poems,
including the entire text of Virgil's Aeneid, which Euler had committed to
memory as a boy and still could recite flawlessly half a century later. No writer of
fiction would dare to provide a character with a memory of this calibre.

Part of Euler‘s well-deserved reputation rests upon the textbooks he

authored. While some of these were written at the highest level of mathematical
sophistication, he did not find it demeaning to write more elementary books as
well. Perhaps his best-known text was the Introductio in Analysin Infinitorum of
1748. This classic mathematical exposition has been compared to Euclid's
Elements in that it surveyed the discoveries of earlier mathematicians, organized
and cleaned up the proofs, and did the job so well as to render most previous
writings obsolete. To the Introductio he added a volume on differential calculus
in 1755 and three volumes on integral calculus in 1768-74, thereby charting the
general direction for mathematical analysis down to the present day.

In all of his texts, Euler's exposition was quite lucid, and his mathematical
notation was chosen so as to clarify, not obscure, the underlying ideas. Indeed,
Euler's mathematical writings are the first that look truly modern to today's
reader; this, of course, is not because he chose a modern notation but because
his influence was so pervasive that all subsequent mathematicians adopted his
style, notation, and format. Moreover, he wrote with an understanding that not
all his readers had his awesome ability for learning mathematics. Euler was not
the stereotypical mathematician who sees deeply into the nature of his subject
but finds it impossible to convey his ideas to others. On the contrary, he cared
deeply about teaching. Condorcet, in a wonderful little phrase, said of Euler:
"He preferred instructing his pupils to the little satisfaction of amazing them." This
is quite a compliment to a person who, if he had so chosen, could surely have
amazed anyone with his mathematical prowess.

Any discussion of Euler's mathematics somehow returns to his Opera

Omnia, those 73 volumes of collected papers. These contain the 886 books and
articleswritten variously in Latin, French, and German that he produced during
his career. His output was so huge and the pace of its production so rapid-even
in the darkness of his later life-that a publication backlog is reported to have
lasted 47 years after his death.
As noted, Euler did not confine his work to pure mathematics. Rather, his
opus contains papers on acoustics, engineering, mechanics, astronomy, and
 Page 21 of 37

even a three-volume treatise on optical devices such as telescopes and

microscopes. Incredible as it sounds, it has been estimated that, if one were to
collect all publications in the mathematical sciences produced over the last
three-quarters of the eighteenth century, roughly one-third of these were from
the pen of Leonhard Euler! Standing in a library before his collected works, one
surveys shelf upon shelf of large volumes with a sense of disbelief. Contained in
those thousands of pages are seminal papers that charted new directions for
whole areas of mathematics, from the calculus of variations, to graph theory, to
complex analysis, to differential equations. Virtually every branch of
mathematics has theorems of major Significance that are attributed to Euler.
Thus, we find the Euler triangle in geometry, the Euler characteristic in topology,
and the Euler circuit in graph theory, not to mention such entities as the Euler
constant, the Euler polynomials, the Euler integrals, and so on. And even this is
but half the story, for a large number of mathematical results traditionally
attributed to others was in fact discovered by Euler and appears neatly tucked
away amid the huge body of his work.
Mathematical notation created or popularized by Euler

Much of the notation used by

mathematicians today including e, i f(𝑥)
∑ and the use of a, b, and c, as
constants and 𝑥 𝑦 𝑛𝑑 𝑧 as unknowns –
was either created, popularized or
standardized by Euler. His efforts to
standardize these and other symbols
(including and the trigonometric
functions) helped to internationalize
mathematics and to encourage
collaboration on problems.
He even managed to combine
several of these together in an amazing
feat of mathematical alchemy to
produce one of the most beautiful of all
mathematical equations, eiπ + 1 = 0 ,
sometimes known as Euler’s Identity. This equation combines arithmetic,
calculus, trigonometry and complex analysis into what has been called ―the
most remarkable formula in mathematics’, ―uncanny and sublime‖ and ―filled
with cosmic beauty’, among other descriptions. Another such discovery, often
known simply as Euler’s Formula, is eix = cos x + isinx . In fact, in a recent poll of
mathematicians, three of the top five most beautiful formulae of all time were
 Page 22 of 37

Euler‘s. He seemed to have an instinctive ability to demonstrate the deep

relationships between trigonometry, exponentials and complex numbers.

The discovery that initially sealed Euler‘s reputation was announced in

1735 and concerned the calculation of infinite sums. It was called the Basel
problem after the Bernoulli’s had tried and failed to solve it, and asked what
was the precise sum of the of the reciprocals of the squares of all the natural
numbers to infinity i.e. (a zeta function using a zeta constant of 2). Euler‘s friend
Daniel Bernoulli had estimated the sum to be about , but Euler‘s superior
2
method yielded the exact but rather unexpected result of 𝜋 3 . He also showed
that the infinite series was equivalent to an infinite product of prime numbers, an
identity which would later inspire Riemann‘s investigation of complex zeta
functions.
The Seven Bridges of Königsberg Problem

Also in 1735, Euler solved an

intransigent mathematical and logical
problem, known as the Seven Bridges of
Königsberg Problem, which had perplexed
scholars for many years, and in doing so laid
the foundations of graph theory and
presaged the important mathematical idea
of topology. The city of Königsberg in Prussia
(modern-day Kaliningrad in Russia) was set on
both sides of the Pregel River, and included
two large islands which were connected to
each other and the mainland by seven
bridges. The problem was to find a route
through the city that would cross each bridge
once and only once.

In fact, Euler proved that the problem has no solution, but in doing so he
made the important conceptual leap of pointing out that the choice of route
within each landmass is irrelevant and the only important feature is the
sequence of bridges crossed. This allowed him to reformulate the problem in
abstract terms, replacing each land mass with an abstract node and each
bridge with an abstract connection. This resulted in a mathematical structure
called a ―graph‖, a pictorial representation made up of points (vertices)
connected by nonintersecting curves (arcs), which may be distorted in any way
without changing the graph itself.
 Page 23 of 37

In this way, Euler was able to deduce that, because the four land masses
in the original problem are touched by an odd number of bridges, the existence
of a walk traversing each bridge once only inevitably leads to a contradiction. If
Königsberg had had one fewer bridges, on the other hand, with an even
number of bridges leading to each piece of land, then a solution would have
been possible.
List of theorems and methods pioneered
by Euler
The list of theorems and methods
pioneered by Euler is immense, and
largely outside the scope of an entry-
level study such as this, but mention
could be made of just some of them:
 the demonstration of geometrical
properties such as Euler‘s Line and Euler‘s
Circle;
 the definition of the Euler Characteristic
χ (chi) for the surfaces of polyhedra,
whereby the number of vertices minus
the number of edges plus the number of faces always equals 2 (see table at
right);
 a new method for solving quartic equations;

 the Prime Number Theorem, which describes the asymptotic distribution of the
prime numbers;
 proofs (and in some cases disproofs) of some of Fermat‘s theorems and
conjectures;
 the discovery of over 60 amicable numbers (pairs of numbers for which the
sum of the divisors of one number equals the other number), although some
were actually incorrect;
 a method of calculating integrals with complex limits (foreshadowing the
development of modern complex analysis);
 the calculus of variations, including its best-known result, the Euler-Lagrange
equation; a proof of the infinitude of primes, using the divergence of the
harmonic series;
 Page 24 of 37

 the integration of Leibniz‗s differential calculus with Newton‗s Method of

Fluxions into a form of calculus we would recognize today, as well as the
development of tools to make it easier to apply calculus to real physical
problems.

Leonhard Euler died suddenly on September 7, 1783. Up until the end, he

had been mathematically active, in spite of his blindness. Reportedly, he spent
his last day playing with his grandchildren and –discussing the latest theories
about the planet Uranus. For Euler, the end came quickly when, in Condorcet's
phrase, “He ceased to calculate and to live.‖ He is buried in St. Petersburg (now
called Leningrad), which had been his home, on and off, for so many happy
year.
Pierre de Fermat (1601 – 1665)
The French mathematician Pierre de Fermat (1601-
1665) was possibly the most productive
mathematician of his era, making many contributions,
some of which were to calculus, number theory, and
the law of refraction. We will survey those contributions
here, paying particular attention to his work in number
theory.
The following account of Fermat's background
is taken from Mahoney's book, The Mathematical
Career of Pierre de Fermat. Pierre de Fermat was born
on August 17, 1960, in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, a small
town near Toulouse in the south part of France, near the border with Spain. His
father, Dominique Fermat, was a wealthy leather merchant who held the
position of "second consul" of Beaumont-de-Lomagne, a governmental position
similar to the position of mayor in our time. His mother, Claire, née de Long, was
the daughter of a prominent family. Fermat had a brother, Clément, and two
sisters, Louise and Marie.
While relatively little is known of Fermat's early education, it is known that
he was of Basque origin and received his primary and secondary education at
the monastery of Grandsl ve, run by the Cordeliers (Franciscans), in Beaumont-
deLomagne. For his advanced studies he first attended the University of
Toulouse before moving to Bordeaux in the second half of the 1620's. In
Bordeaux (1629) Fermat began his first serious mathematical researches, where
he gave a copy of his restoration of Appollonius's Plane Loci to one of the
mathematicians there. In Bordeaux he contacted Beaugrand and during this
 Page 25 of 37

time he produced work on maxima and minima. He gave his work to Etienne
de'Espagnet, who shared mathematical interests with Fermat.

From Bordeaux Fermat went to study at the University of Law at Orléans.

On May 1, 1631 he received the degree of Bachelor of Civil Laws. Fermat's
choice of a legal career was natural and typical of his time, for his father's
wealth and his mother's famil y background. To be in this career was an avenue
to a higher social status and political power. After graduating he purchased the
office of councillor at the parliament in Toulouse. Soon after that he acquired a
wife. She was his cousin fourth removed, Lo uise de Long. He gave a dowry of
12,000 livres, which was not a problem for the young lawyer. Soon after, he
served in the local parliament and became councillor, or legislator. His entire
family, now including his father-in-law, were members of the upper class.
Mahoney tells us how this affected his social status as well.
"Fermat's offices made him a member of that social class also and entitled
him to add the "de" to his name, which he did from 1631 on." (Mahoney, p.16)
The "de" is the mark of nobility in France.
Very little is known about Fermat's private life. He had five children,
ClémentSamuel, Jean, Claire, Catherine, and Louise. Clément-Samuel was the
oldest and closest to Fermat. He may have shared many mathematical interests
with Fermat. Clément-Samuel eventually inherited his father's office of councillor.
For the remainder of his life Fermat lived in Toulouse, but he also worked in his
hometown of Beaumont-de-Lomagne, and the nearby town of Castres. First he
worked in the lower chamber of Parliament, but then in 1638 he was appointed
to the higher chamber, and finally in 1652 he was promoted to the highest level
in the criminal court. This position was usually given to people of seniority, but
since the plague had struck in the early 1650's, many of the older men had died.
Fermat himself was struck down w ith the plague. In 1653 his death was wrongly
reported; Fermat had survived. This account of Fermat's background and life
was taken from [Mahoney, pp. 15-17].
Fermat’s mathematical work was communicated mainly in letters to
friends, often with little or no proof of his theorems. Although he himself claimed
to have proved all his arithmetic theorems, few records of his proofs have
survived, and many mathematicians have doubted some of his claims,
especially given the difficulty of some of the problems and the limited
mathematical tools available to Fermat.
 Page 26 of 37

The Two Square Theorem

One example of his many
theorems is the Two Square Theorem,
which shows that any prime number
which, when divided by 4, leaves a
remainder of 1 (i.e. can be written in the
form 4n + 1), can always be re-written
as the sum of two square numbers (see
image at right for examples).
His so-called Little Theorem is
often used in the testing of large prime
numbers, and is the basis of the codes
which protect our credit cards in
Internet transactions today. In simple (sic) terms, it says that if we have two
numbers a and p, where p is a prime number and not a factor of a, then a
multiplied by itself p-1 times and then divided by p, will always leave a
remainder of 1. In mathematical terms, this is written: a (p-1) = 1(𝑚𝑜𝑑 𝑝). For
example, if a = 7 and p = 3, then 72 ÷ 3 should leave a remainder of 1, and 49 ÷ 3
does in fact leave a remainder of 1.
Fermat numbers

Fermat identified a subset of numbers, now known as Fermat numbers, which

are of the form of one less than 2 to the power of a power of 2, or, written
mathematically, . The first five such numbers are:

Interestingly, these are all prime numbers (and are known as Fermat
primes), but all the higher Fermat numbers which have been painstakingly
identified over the years are NOT prime numbers, which just goes to show the
value of inductive proof in mathematics.
 Page 27 of 37

Analyses of Curves
Fermat‘s study of curves and equations prompted him to generalize the
equation for the ordinary parabola a𝑦 = 𝑥2 , and that for the rectangular
hyperbola 𝑥𝑦 = a2, to the form a n-1 𝑦 = 𝑥n . The curves determined by this
equation are known as the parabolas or hyperbolas of Fermat according as n is
positive or negative. He similarly generalized the Archimedean spiral r = aθ .
These curves in turn directed him in the middle 1630s to an algorithm, or rule of
mathematical procedure, that was equivalent to differentiation. This procedure
enabled him to find equations of tangents to curves and to locate maximum,
minimum, and inflection points of polynomial curves, which are graphs of linear
combinations of powers of the independent variable. During the same years, he
found formulas for areas bounded by these curves through a summation
process that is equivalent to the formula now used for the same purpose in the
integral calculus. Such a formula is:

It is not known whether or not Fermat noticed that differentiation of 𝑥 ,

leading to 𝑛a n-1 , is the inverse of integrating 𝑥 . Through ingenious
transformations he handled problems involving more general algebraic curves,
and he applied his analysis of infinitesimal quantities to a variety of other
problems, including the calculation of centres of gravity and finding the lengths
of curves. Descartes in the Géométrie had reiterated the widely held view,
stemming from Aristotle, that the precise rectification or determination of the
length of algebraic curves was impossible; but Fermat was one of several
mathematicians who, in the years 1657–59, disproved the dogma. In a paper
entitled ―De Linearum Curvarum cum Lineis Rectis Comparatione’ (‘Concerning
the Comparison of Curved Lines with Straight Lines’), he showed that the
semicubical parabola and certain other algebraic curves were strictly
rectifiable. He also solved the related problem of finding the surface area of a
segment of a paraboloid of revolution. This paper appeared in a supplement to
the Veterum Geometria Promota, issued by the mathematician Antoine de La
Loubère in 1660. It was Fermat‘s only mathematical work published in his lifetime.
Disagreement with Other Cartesian Views
Fermat differed also with Cartesian views concerning the law of refraction
(the sines of the angles of incidence and refraction of light passing through
media of different densities are in a constant ratio), published by Descartes in
1637 in La Dioptrique; like La Géométrie, it was an appendix to his celebrated
 Page 28 of 37

Discours de la méthode. Descartes had sought to justify the sine law through a
premise that light travels more rapidly in the denser of the two media involved in
the refraction. Twenty years later Fermat noted that this appeared to be in
conflict with the view espoused by Aristotelians that nature always chooses the
shortest path. Applying his method of maxima and minima and making the
assumption that light travels less rapidly in the denser medium, Fermat showed
that the law of refraction is consonant with his ―principle of least time.‖ His
argument concerning the speed of light was found later to be in agreement
with the wave theory of the 17th-century Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens,
and in 1849 it was verified experimentally by A.-H.-L. Fizeau.

Through the mathematician and theologian Marin Mersenne, who, as a

friend of Descartes, often acted as an intermediary with other scholars, Fermat
in 1638 maintained a controversy with Descartes on the validity of their
respective methods for tangents to curves. Fermat‘s views were fully justified
some 30 years later in the calculus of Sir Isaac Newton. Recognition of the
significance of Fermat‘s work in analysis was tardy, in part because he adhered
to the system of mathematical symbols devised by François Viète, notations that
Descartes‘s Géométrie had rendered largely obsolete. The handicap imposed
by the awkward notations operated less severely in Fermat‘s favourite field of
study, the theory of numbers; but here, unfortunately, he found no
correspondent to share his enthusiasm. In 1654 he had enjoyed an exchange of
letters with his fellow mathematician Blaise Pascal on problems in probability
concerning games of chance, the results of which were extended and
published by Huygens in his De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae (1657).
Last Theorem

Fermat‘s pièce de résistance,

though, was his famous Last Theorem, a
conjecture left unproven at his death,
and which puzzled mathematicians for
over 350 years. The theorem, originally
described in a scribbled note in the
margin of his copy of Diophantus‗
‘Arithmetica’, states that three positive
integers a, b and c can satisfy the
equation a n + b n = c n for any integer
value of n greater than two (i.e.
squared). This seemingly simple
conjecture has proved to be one of the
world‘s hardest mathematical problems to prove.
 Page 29 of 37

There are clearly many solutions – indeed, an infinite number – when n = 2

(namely, all the Pythagorean triples), but no solution could be found for cubes
or higher powers. Tantalizingly, Fermat himself claimed to have a proof, but
wrote that ‘ this margin is too small to contain it’. As far as we know from the
papers which have come down to us, however, Fermat only managed to
partially prove the theorem for the special case of n = 4, as did several other
mathematicians who applied themselves to it (and indeed as had earlier
mathematicians dating back to Fibonacci, albeit not with the same intent).
Over the centuries, several mathematical and scientific academies offered
substantial prizes for a proof of the theorem, and to some extent it single-
handedly stimulated the development of algebraic number theory in the 19th
and 20th Centuries. It was finally proved for ALL numbers only in 1995 (a proof
usually attributed to British mathematician Andrew Wiles, although in reality it
was a joint effort of several steps involving many mathematicians over several
years). The final proof made use of complex modern mathematics, such as the
modularity theorem for semi-stable elliptic curves, Galois representations and
Ribet‘s epsilon theorem, all of which were unavailable in Fermat‘s time, so it
seems clear that Fermat‘s claim to have solved his last theorem was almost
certainly an exaggeration (or at least a misunderstanding).
In addition to his work in number theory, Fermat anticipated the
development of calculus to some extent, and his work in this field was invaluable
later to Newton and Leibniz. While investigating a technique for finding the
centres of gravity of various plane and solid figures, he developed a method for
determining maxima, minima and tangents to various curves that was essentially
equivalent to differentiation. Also, using an ingenious trick, he was able to
reduce the integral of general power functions to the sums of geometric series.
Fermat‘s correspondence with his friend Pascal also helped
mathematicians grasp a very important concept in basic probability which,
although perhaps intuitive to us now, was revolutionary in 1654, namely the idea
of equally probable outcomes and expected values.

In conclusion, Pierre de Fermat has been called the greatest French

mathematician of the seventeenth century. We have seen his contributions to
calculus, the law of refraction, and most importantly to number theory. Fermat
died on January 1 2, 1665 in Castres, France. Unfortunately Fermat's influence
was not very great, because he was reluctant to publish his work. However, he is
still remembered as a very great mathematician.
 Page 30 of 37

René Descartes (1596 – 1650)

René Descartes has been dubbed the
―Father of Modern Philosophy―, but he was also
one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution of
the 17th Century, and is sometimes considered the
first of the modern school of mathematics.
As a young man, he found employment for a
time as a soldier (essentially as a mercenary in the
pay of various forces, both Catholic and Protestant).
But, after a series of dreams or visions, and after
meeting the Dutch philosopher and scientist Isaac
Beeckman, who sparked his interest in mathematics
and the New Physics, he concluded that his real path in life was the pursuit of
true wisdom and science.
Early Life
Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, a small
town in central France, which has since been renamed after him to honor its
most famous son. He was the youngest of three children, and his mother,
Jeanne Brochard, died within his first year of life. His father, Joachim, a council
member in the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their maternal
grandmother, where they remained even after he remarried a few years later.
But he was very concerned with good education and sent René, at age 8, to
boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche, several miles to the
north, for seven years.
Descartes was a good student, although it is thought that he might have
been sickly, since he didn‘t have to abide by the school‘s rigorous schedule and
was instead allowed to rest in bed until midmorning. The subjects he studied,
such as rhetoric and logic and the ―mathematical arts,‖ which included music
and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics,
equipped him well for his future as a philosopher. So did spending the next four
years earning a baccalaureate in law at the University of Poitiers. Some scholars
speculate that he may have had a nervous breakdown during this time.
Descartes later added theology and medicine to his studies. But he
eschewed all this, ―resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which
could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world,‖ he wrote much
later in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking
Truth in the Sciences, published in 1637.
 Page 31 of 37

So he travelled, joined the army for a brief time, saw some battles and
was introduced to Dutch scientist and philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who would
become for Descartes a very influential teacher. A year after graduating from
Poitiers, Descartes credited a series of three very powerful dreams or visions with
determining the course of his study for the rest of his life.

Becoming the Father of Modern Philosophy

Descartes is considered by many to be the father of modern philosophy,

because his ideas departed widely from current understanding in the early 17th
century, which was more feeling-based. While elements of his philosophy
weren‘t completely new, his approach to them was. Descartes believed in
basically clearing everything off the table, all preconceived and inherited
notions, and starting fresh, putting back one by one the things that were certain,
which for him began with the statement ―I exist.‖ From this sprang his most
famous quote: ‘I think; therefore I am.’
Since Descartes believed that all truths were ultimately linked, he sought
to uncover the meaning of the natural world with a rational approach, through
science and mathematics—in some ways an extension of the approach Sir
Francis Bacon had asserted in England a few decades prior. In addition to
Discourse on the Method, Descartes also published Meditations on First
Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy, among other treatises.
Although philosophy is largely where the 20th century deposited
Descartes— each century has focused on different aspects of his work—his
investigations in theoretical physics led many scholars to consider him a
mathematician first. He introduced Cartesian geometry, which incorporates
algebra; through his laws of refraction, he developed an empirical
understanding of rainbows; and he proposed a naturalistic account of the
formation of the solar system, although he felt he had to suppress much of that
due to Galileo‘s fate at the hands of the Inquisition. His concern wasn‘t
misplaced—Pope Alexander VII later added Descartes‘ works to the Index of
Prohibited Books.
Cartesian Coordinate System
It was in ―La Géométrie‖ that Descartes first proposed that each point in
two dimensions can be described by two numbers on a plane, one giving the
point‘s horizontal location and the other the vertical location, which have come
to be known as Cartesian coordinates. He used perpendicular lines (or axes),
crossing at a point called the origin, to measure the horizontal (x) and vertical
 Page 32 of 37

(y) locations, both positive and negative, thus effectively dividing the plane up
into four quadrants.

Any equation can be

represented on the plane by plotting
on it the solution set of the equation.
For example, the simple equation 𝑦 = 𝑥
yields a straight line linking together the
points (0,0 ) ( 1,1) (2,2 ) ( 3,3), etc. The
equation 𝑦 =2𝑥 yields a straight line
linking together the points (0,1 ) ( 1,2)
(2,4 ) ( 3,6) etc. More complex
equations involving 𝑥 2, 𝑥3 , etc., plot
various types of curves on the plane.
As a point moves along a curve,
then, its coordinates change, but an
equation can be written to describe
the change in the value of the
coordinates at any point in the figure.
Using this novel approach, it soon
became clear that an equation like 𝑥2
+ 𝑦2 =4, for example, describes a circle; 𝑦2 – 16𝑥 a curve called a parabola;

an ellipse; a hyperbola.
Descartes‘ ground-breaking work, usually referred to as analytic geometry
or Cartesian geometry, had the effect of allowing the conversion of geometry
into algebra (and vice versa). Thus, a pair of simultaneous equations could now
be solved either algebraically or graphically (at the intersection of two lines). It
allowed the development of Newton‘s and Leibniz‘s subsequent discoveries of
calculus. It also unlocked the possibility of navigating geometries of higher
dimensions, impossible to physically visualize – a concept which was to become
central to modern technology and physics – thus transforming mathematics
forever.
Rule of Signs

Although analytic geometry was far and away Descartes‘ most important
contribution to mathematics, he also: developed a ‘rule of signs’ technique for
determining the number of positive or negative real roots of a polynomial;
―invented‖ (or at least popularized) the superscript notation for showing powers
 Page 33 of 37

or exponents (e.g. 24 to show 2 x

2 x 2 x 2); and re-discovered
Thabit ibn Qurra‘s general
formula for amicable numbers,
as well as the amicable pair
9,363,584 and 9,437,056 (which
had also been discovered by
another Islamic mathematician,
Yazdi, almost a century earlier).
For all his importance in the
development of modern
mathematics, though, Descartes
is perhaps best known today as a
philosopher who espoused
rationalism and dualism. His
philosophy consisted of a
method of doubting everything,
then rebuilding knowledge from the ground, and he is particularly known for the
often-quoted statement ―Cogito ergo sum’(‘I think, therefore I am’).
He also had an influential rôle in the development of modern physics, a
rôle which has been, until quite recently, generally under-appreciated and
under investigated. He provided the first distinctly modern formulation of laws of
nature and a conservation principle of motion, made numerous advances in
optics and the study of the reflection and refraction of light, and constructed
what would become the most popular theory of planetary motion of the late
17th Century. His commitment to the scientific method was met with strident
opposition by the church officials of the day.
His revolutionary ideas made him a centre of controversy in his day, and
he died in 1650 far from home in Stockholm, Sweden. 13 years later, his works
were placed on the Catholic Church‘s ‘Index of Prohibited Books’.

Final Years and Heritage

In 1644, 1647, and 1648, after 16 years in the Netherlands, Descartes
returned to France for brief visits on financial business and to oversee the
translation into French of the Principles, the Meditations, and the Objections and
Replies. (The Descartes‘ Rule of Signs 84 SEME 101 – History of Mathematics -
Module IItranslators were, respectively, Picot, Charles d‘Albert, duke de Luynes,
and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he also met with Gassendi and Hobbes, and he
suggested to Pascal the famous experiment of taking a barometer up Mount
 Page 34 of 37

Puy-de-Dôme to determine the influence of the weight of the air. Picot returned
with Descartes to the Netherlands for the winter of 1647–48. During Descartes‘s
final stay in Paris in 1648, the French nobility revolted against the crown in a
series of wars known as the Fronde. Descartes left precipitously on August 17,
1648, only days before the death of his old friend Mersenne.
Clerselier‘s brother-in-law, Hector Pierre Chanut, who was French resident
in Sweden and later ambassador, helped to procure a pension for Descartes
from Louis XIV, though it was never paid. Later, Chanut engineered an invitation
for Descartes to the court of Queen Christina, who by the close of the Thirty
Years‘ War (1618–48) had become one of the most important and powerful
monarchs in Europe. Descartes went reluctantly, arriving early in October 1649.
He may have gone because he needed patronage; the Fronde seemed to
have destroyed his chances in Paris, and the Calvinist theologians were
harassing him in the Netherlands.
In Sweden—where, Descartes said, in winter men‘s thoughts freeze like the
water—the 22-year-old Christina perversely made the 53-year-old Descartes rise
before 5:00 AM to give her philosophy lessons, even though she knew of his
habit of lying in bed until 11 o‘clock in the morning. She also is said to have
ordered him to write the verses of a ballet, The Birth of Peace (1649), to
celebrate her role in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years‘
War. The verses in fact were not written by Descartes, though he did write the
statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences. While delivering these
statutes to the queen at 5:00 AM on February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and he
soon developed pneumonia. He died in Stockholm on February 11. Many pious
last words have been attributed to him, but the most trustworthy report is that of
his German valet, who said that Descartes was in a coma and died without
saying anything at all.
Descartes‘s papers came into the possession of Claude Clerselier, a pious
Catholic, who began the process of turning Descartes into a saint by cutting,
adding to, and selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work culminated in
1691 in the massive biography by Father Adrien Baillet, who was at work on a 17-
volume Lives of the Saints. Even during Descartes‘s lifetime there were questions
about whether he was a Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with
supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting
himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and
materialistic physics.
These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because all the
papers, letters, and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost.
 Page 35 of 37

In 1667 the Roman Catholic Church made its own decision by putting
Descartes‘s works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Latin: ―Index of Prohibited
Books‖) on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-
Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the
Netherlands called Descartes a Jesuit and a papist—which is to say an atheist.
He retorted that they were intolerant, ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, a
majority of scholars, many of whom were religious, believed that Descartes‘s
major concerns were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th century,
however, numerous commentators had come to believe that Descartes was a
Catholic in the same way he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth
and by convention. Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when
one thinks too much of God. He once told a German protégée, Anna Maria
van Schurman (1607–78), who was known as a painter and a poet, that she was
wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly
aware of—though he tried to conceal—the atheistic potential of his materialist
physics and physiology. Descartes seemed indifferent to the emotional depths
of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe
and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes exulted in the power
of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote happiness, and he
rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. He
held that it is impertinent to pray to God to change things. Instead, when we
cannot change the world, we must change ourselves.
 Page 36 of 37

SUMMATIVE TEST
Solve for the following and show your complete solution.

1. Can you identify how the Fibonacci numbers are used in Pascal‘s Triangle?

2. Complete the following magic squares

a. Using only the digits 1 to 16 complete the magic square so that the sum of
each row, column or diagonal is 34.

b. Using only the digits 1 to 9 complete the magic square. All columns, rows and
diagonals must sum to 15

3. Take 5 photos of the nature that represents Golden Ratio and

describe each.

Example
 Page 37 of 37

Activity

Find the names/words/phrases defined on the following statements:

1. 4. A branch of mathematics concerned with the calculation of
instantaneous rates of change and the summation of infinitely many small
factors to determine some whole
2. 5. He developed much of our modern notation for calculus
3. 6. He is considered one of the founders of modern science
4. 7. After Newton and Leibniz, they continued the development of the
Calculus
5. 8. A powerful procedure for finding roots of equations
6. 9. One of Isaac Newton‘s first successes, and a definite step toward
calculus, was his extension of it 10.He attempted to put the calculus on a
rigorous geometrical basis
7. 11.In the 1670's, Leibniz discovered this general principle or technique to
evaluate areas.