Archive for mathematics
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0850 – al-Battani – bio
al-Battani (Abu Abdallah Mohammad ibn Jabir Al-Battani) was born around 850 in Turkey (then Mesopotamia) and was a mathematician and astronomer. He advanced the accuracy of astronomical observations beyond that established in Ptolemy’s “Almagest”, including the motion of five planets and the length of our solar year. He catalogued 489 stars. He pioneered the use [...]
1862 – Hilbert – bio
David Hilbert was born in 1862 in Germany and was a mathematician. He worked on creating a set of axioms as the foundation for Euclidean geometry. He was the creator of a concept of abstract vector space that extends mathematical techniques beyond Euclidean spaces into spaces of many dimensions. This is now know as “Hilbert [...]
1786 – Arago – bio
Francoise Arago was born in 1786 in France and was an astronomer, physicist and mathematician. Some of his work complemented similar work by Faraday and Fresnel. His confirmation of a bright spot of light at the center of a circular shadow helped confirm Fresnel’s wave theory of light and is now known as “Arago’s spot”. [...]
1768 – Fourier – bio
Jean Babtiste Joseph Fourier (known as Joseph) was born in 1768 in France and was a mathematician who became known for his work on heat transfer and the analysis of periodic functions (wave forms) using combinations of trigonometric series. These are now called Fourier series and the process is called Fourier analysis. PRECURSOR: 1642 – [...]
1238 – Yang Hui – bio
Yang Hui was born in Zhejiang province in China in 1238 during the Song Dynasty and was a mathematician who was associated with a triangular array of numbers very similar to Pascals triangle. Just as Pascal did not invent the triangle, Yang Hui seems to have inherited the knowledge of the numbers from Jia Xian, [...]
Golden Data
Voyager1 is currently the most distant human made object from the Earth, somewhere beyond 10 billion miles from the Sun. When we launched Voyager1 in 1977, a “golden record” was included with it, in the hopes that it would be able to communicate something about life on Earth to any intelligent beings that found it. [...]
1623 – Pascal – bio
Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered so [...]
1885 – Weyl – bio
Born near Hamburg, Germany in 1885, Hermann Weyl was a mathematician whose work had a strong influence on both physics and number theory. He worked on combining general relativity and the laws of electromagnetism. He worked with Lie algebras, symmetry and created the first version of gauge theory which attempted to describe both electromagnetic and [...]
1048 – Omar Khayyam – bio
Omar Khayyam was born in Persia in 1048 and was a mathematician, astronomer and poet. He was known for using a geometric approach to analyzing algebra problems and for solving cubic equations using line segments. He noted that solving the cubic required the use of conic sections and could not be solved simply with a [...]
1521 – Taqi al-Din
Born in Damascus, Syria in 1521, Taqi al-Din was an all around scientist, exelling at astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine, botany, and a wide variety of engineering applications. He was also a judge and religious philospher. He described a steam turbine engine in a book called, “The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines” in 1551. He invented [...]
