Mathematics History
Prehistoric human beings probably learned to count at least up to ten on their fingers. The Chinese, Hindus, Babylonians, and Egyptians all devised methods of counting and measuring that were of practical importance in their everyday lives. The first theoretical mathematician is held to be Thales of Miletus (c. 580 BC) who is believed to have proposed the first theorems in plane geometry. His disciple Pythagoras established geometry as a recognized science among the Greeks.
The later school of Alexandrian geometers (4th and 3rd centuries BC) included Euclid and Archimedes. Our present decimal numerals are based on a Hindu-Arabic system that reached Europe about AD 100 from Arab mathematicians of the Middle East such as Khwarizmi.
Europe Western mathematics began to develop from the 15th century. Geometry was revitalized by the invention of coordinate geometry by René Descartes 1637; Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat developed probability theory, John Napier invented logarithms, and Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed calculus. In Russia, Nikolai Lobachevsky rejected Euclid’s
Mathematics Chronology Table
| 2500 BC | The people of Mesopotamia ( now Irq) developed a positional numbering (place-value) system, in which the value of a digit depends in its position in a number |
| 2000 BC | Mesopotamian mathematicians solved quadratic equations (algebraic equations in which the highest power of a variable is 2) |
| 0876 BC | A symbol for zero was used for the first time, in India |
| 0550 BC | Greek mathematician, Pythagoras formulated a theorem relating the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. The theorem was already known by earlier mathematicians in China, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. |
| 0450 BC | Hipparcos of Metapontum discovered that some numbers are irrational( cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers) |
| 0300 BC | Euclid laid out the laws of geometry in his book Elements , in which was to remain a standard text for 2,000 years. |
| 0230 BC | Eratosthenes developed a method for finding all prime numbers |
| 0100 BC | Chinese mathematicians began using negative numbers. |
| 0190 BC | Chinese mathematicias used powers of 10 to express magnitudes |
| AD 0210 | Diophantus of Alexandria wrote the first book on algebra |
| AD 0600 | A decimal number system was deveoped in India. |
| AD 0829 | Persian mathematician Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi published a work on algebra that made use of the decimal number system |
| AD 1202 | Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci studied the sequence of numbers(1,2,3,5,8,13,21 ...) in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones |
| AD 1550 | In Germany, Pheticus published trigonometrical tables that simplified calculations involving triangles |
| AD 1614 | Scottish mathematician John Napier invented logarithms, which enable lengthy calculations involving multiplication and division to be carried out by addition and subraction. |
| AD 1623 | Wlhelm Schickard invented the mechanical calculating machine. |
| AD 1637 | French mathematician and philosopherRene Descartes introduced coordinate geometry. |
| AD 1654 | In France, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat developed probability theory |
| AD 1666 | Issac Newton developed differential calculus, a method of calculating rates of change. |
| AD 1675 | German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduced the mordern notation for integral calculus, a method of calculating volumes. |
| AD 1679 | Leibniz introduced binary arithmetic, in which only two symbols are used to represent all numbers. |
| AD 1684 | Leibniz published the first account of differential calculus. |
| AD 1718 | Jakob Bernoulli in Switzerland published his work on the calculus of variations ( the study of functions that are close to their minimum or maximum values) |
| AD 1746 | In France, Jean le Rond d'Alembert developed the theory of complex numbers. |
| AD 1747 | D'Alembert used partial differential equations in mathematical physics. |
| AD 1798 | Norwegian mathematician Caspar Wessel introduced the vector representation of complex numbers. |
| AD 1799 | Karl Friedrich Gauss of Germany proved the fundamental theorem of algebra : the number of solutions of an algebraic equations is the same as the exponent of the highest term. |
| AD 1810 | In France, Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier published his method of representing functions by a series of trigonometric functions. |
| AD 1812 | French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplae published the first complete account of probability theory. |
| AD 1822 | In the UK, Charles Babbage began construction of the first mechanical computer, the difference machine, a device for calculating logarithms and trigonometric functions. |
| AD 1827 | Gauss introduced differential geometry, in which small features of curves are described by analytical methods. |
| AD 1829 | In Russia, Nikolai Ivanonvich Lobachevsky developed hyperbolic geometry, in which a plane is regarded as part of a hyperbolic surface, shaped like a saddle. In France, Evaniste Galois introduced the theory of groups ( collections whose members obey certain simple rules of addition and multiplication) |
| AD 1844 | French mathematician Joseph Liouville found the first transcendental number, which canot be expressed as an algebraic equation with rational coefficients. In Germany, Hermann Grassmann studied vectors with more than three dimensions. |
| AD 1854 | George Boole in the UK published his system of symbolic logic, now called Bolean algebra. |
| AD 1858 | English mathematician Arthur Cayley developed calculations using ordered tables called matrices. |
| AD 1865 | August Ferdinand Mobius in Germany described how a strip paper can have only one side and one edge. |
| AD 1892 | German mathematician Georg Cantor showed that there are different kinds of infinity and studied transfinite numbers. |
| AD 1895 | Jules Henri Poincare published the first paper on topology, often called " the geometry of rubber sheets". |
| AD 1931 | In the US, Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Godel prved that any formal system strong enough to include the laws of arithmetic is either incomplete or inconsistent |
| AD 1937 | English mathematician Alan Turing pubilshed the mathematical theory of computing. |
| AD 1944 |
John Von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern developed game theory in the US. |
| AD 1945 | The first general purpose, fully electronic digital computer, ENIAC(electronic numerator, integrator, analyzer, and computer), was built at the University of Pennsylvania, US. |
| AD 1961 |
Meteorologist Edward Lorenz at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, US, discovered a mathematical system with chaotic behavior, leading to a new branch of mathematics - chaos theory. |
| AD 1962 | Benoit Mandelbrot in the US invented fractal images, using a omputer that repeats the same mathematical pattern over and over again. |
| AD 1975 | US mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum discovered a new fundamental constant (approximately 4.669201609103), which places an important role in chaos theory. |
| AD 1980 | Mathematicians worldwide completed the classification of all finite and simple groups, a task that took over a hundred mathematicians more than 35 years to complete and whose results too more than 14,000 pages in mathematical journals. |
| AD 1989 | A team of US computer mathematicians at Amdahl Coporation, California, discovered the highest known prime number (it contains 65,087 digits) |
| AD 1993 | US mathematician Andrew wiles published a 1,000 page proof of Fermat's last theorem, one of the most baffling challengees in pure mathematics |