CHAP 1

• Sumerians (from Sumer, a region of Mesopotamia) were the first people to assign symbols to group of objects to represent numbers. They developed the earliest known writing system known as cuneiform script.
• The Egyptians were the first people to develop a numerical system that was based on the number 10. Hieroglyphic Numerals developed in Egypt.
• Babylonians in Mesopotamia used the Sexagesimal System
• Euclid wrote the Elements, a compilation of theorems, axioms in Algebra and postulates and theorems in Geometry. With this, he gained the title, "Father of Geometry".
• Archimedes of Syracuse, a Greek mathematician derived a range of formulas in Geometry including the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere and the area under a parabola.
• Hipparchus of Nicaea was a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician considered as the founder of trigonometry.
• Leonardo of Pisa, also called Fibonacci, wrote Liber Abaci, a book filled with arithmetical and algebraic information which he had collected during his travels.
• The best known contribution of Hindu mathematics to modern mathematics was the decimal position system.
• Johannes Widmann was a German mathematician. The + and - symbols first appeared in print in his book Mercantile Arithmetic published in Leipzig in 1489
• Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia revealed to the world the formula for solving first one type, and later all types, of cubic equations (equations with terms including x"),
• John Napier, and others greatly extend the power of mathematics as a calculatory science with his discovery of logarithms.
• Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer and a mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus.
• Blaise Pascal laid the foundations of the Probability Theory together with Fermat. He invented the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator, He is also known for the Pascal's Triangle, a tool for expanding a binomial (a + b)™.
• Rene Descartes was another notable mathematician of the 17th cen-tury. He invented the Cartesian coordinate system
• Gottfried Leibniz discovered infinitesimal calculus, along with Sir Isaac Newton. However, each one made this discovery alone, not while working together.
• Leonhard Euler who, in addition to work in a wide range of mathematical areas, started the Graph Theory, the Calculus of Variations and Differential Geometry.
• Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician proved the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.
• Joseph Louie Lagrange began a rigorous theory of functions and of mechanics. He also played a key role in the creation of the Metric system of weights and measures.
• John Venn Introduced Venn Diagram in 1874. This became a useful tool in Set Theory.
• Benoit Mandelbrot's introduced the theory of fractals. He published The Fractal Geometry of Nature in 1982.
• Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem