HackingTheUniverse

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Ars Magna (The Great Art) published in 1545 by Girolamo Cardano, included techniques for solving cubic (to the third power) and quartic (to the fourth power) equations. The solution for cubic equations was developed by Scipione del Ferro, then passed on to a student who provoked Niccolo Fontana (aka Tartaglia) to also develop the solution. [...]

Johannes Gutenberg was born in 1398 in Mainz, Germany and was a blacksmith, a goldsmith and a printer. He is known for creating a movable type printing press around 1439, which revolutionized the publishing business by allowing mass production of books. While movable type had been demonstrated previously, this was the first documented use of [...]

Calculus was developed as a way to calculate areas and volumes of shapes that are not easy to figure using simple math. Differential calculus studies the derivative, which calculates the slope of a line tangent to the function. The slope of the line shows the rate of change in the line. If the line represents [...]

Christiaan Huygens was born in 1629 in The Hague, Netherlands (then known as the Dutch Republic) and was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He advanced the art of grinding lenses and building telescopes and in 1655 discovered that Titan was a moon of Saturn and in the next year became the first to propose that [...]

Hans Lippershey, a Dutch lensmaker has been given primary credit for making the first recorded optical telescope in 1608, although there is evidence that other telescopes or “looking glasses” existed prior to his work. PRECURSOR: 0085 – Ptolemy 0800 – astrolabe invented 0965 – Alhazen wrote “Book of Optics” and investigated using curved mirrors as [...]

Antony van Leeuwenhoek was born in Delft, the Netherlands in 1632 and is known for creating the field of microbiology. While he did not invent the microscope, he worked to improve it and was the first to document the world of single celled organisms. Van Leeuwenhoek learned to work with glass and discovered that by [...]

Phlogiston theory was a failure and eventually shown to be false. It was based on the idea that any combustible substance contained an element known as phlogiston that was released during the burning process. This had historical roots in various theories of alchemy which generally included four elements: fire, water, air and earth. The first [...]

Pierre de Fermat was born in 1601 in France and was a mathematician. Fermat’s work on integrals paved the way for Newton and Liebnitz to create the foundation for calculus. Pascal and Fermat collaborated on the foundations of probability theory. But Fermat may be most famous for a simple equation known as “Fermat’s Last Theorem”. [...]

Marin Mersenne was born in France in 1588 and studied theology, philosophy, mathematics and music. He is known for some of the first major contributions to acoustics and for his work compiling a list of large prime numbers by using the form 2^p – 1 where p is a known prime number. [raise 2 to [...]

In 1698 Thomas Savery patented a steam powered pump which he called “the miner’s friend” because it was intended to help pump water out of mines. He may have copied the design from a previously published book by Edward Somerset. The device had no piston and almost no moving parts, working through the expansion and [...]