Archive for Torricelli
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1608 – Torricelli – bio
Evangelista Torricelli was born in Italy in 1608 and was a mathematician, astronomer and physicist, mainly known for inventing the barometer. He advanced Galileo’s work on the trajectory of projectiles and worked on rotating shapes around an axis to create three dimensional figures. This helped him create extensions to Cavalieri’s method of indivisibles. “Torricelli’s theorem” […]
1588 – Mersenne – bio
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 […]
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 […]
1643 – barometer
Galileo knew that pumps had a problem pushing water to an elevation above thirty feet and had theorized that a vacuum might be involved. At the time, the idea of a vacuum was controversial and there was no observational evidence that it could exist. He assigned one of his students, Torricelli to work on this […]
