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400
Hypatia writes commentaries on Diophantus and Apollonius
Hypatia is the first recorded female mathematician and she distinguishes herself with remarkable scholarship. She becomes head of the Neo-Platonist school at Alexandria. -
May 15, 1114
Bhaskara is born
Bhaskara's work on calculus predates that of Newton and Leibniz -
May 15, 1202
Fibonacci writes Liber Abaci (The Book of the Abacus)
Liber Abaci sets out the arithmetic and algebra Fibonacci had learned in Arab countries. It also introduces the famous sequence of numbers now called the "Fibonacci sequence". -
May 15, 1434
Leone Battista Alberti publishes Della Pictura
Della Pictura is the first general treatise on the laws of perspective. -
May 15, 1535
Tartaglia discovers how to solve cubic equations
Although Tartaglia could solve cubic equations, he did not share his methods with anyone. -
May 15, 1543
Copernicus publishes De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
(On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres) This work gives a full account of the Copernican theory, namely that the Sun (not the Earth) is at rest in the center of the Universe. -
René Descartes is born
René Descartes developed analytic geometry. -
Pierre de Fermat is born
Pierre de Fermat was possibly the world's finest mathematical amateur. -
Schickard makes a "mechanical clock"
This "mechanical clock" was a wooden calculating machine that could add, subtract, and aid with multiplication and division. He wrote to Kepler suggesting the use of mechanical means to calculate ephemeredes. -
Fermat's Last Theorem is formulated
Fermat left no details of his proof since the margin in which he wrote it is too small. This theorem states that the equation xn + yn = zn has no non-zero solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. -
Leibniz demonstrates his incomplete calculating machine to the Royal Society
This calculating machine can multiply, divide and extract roots. -
Jacob Bernoulli uses the word "integral" for the first time to refer to the area under a curve.
Jacob Bernoulli was a member of the great Bernoulli family of mathematicians in Basel, Switzerland. -
Leonhard Euler is born
Euler was a Swiss mathematician who made enormous contibutions to a wide range of mathematics and physics including analytic geometry, trigonometry, geometry, calculus and number theory. -
Euler introduces the notation f(x)
f(x) stands for "the function of x." -
Leonhard Euler publishes "Elements of Algebra"
"Elements of Algebra" was one of the first books to set out algebra in the modern form that we recognize today. -
Jakob Steiner develops synthetic geometry
His developments were published in Systematische Entwickelung der Abhängigkeit Geometrischer Gestalten von Einander. -
Seventeen Countries sign the Treaty of the Meter
The Treaty of Meter set the standard units of measure as the meter and kilogram. -
Gregory and David Chudnovsky calculated Pi to 2,260,321,336 decimal places
This many digits, printed in a single line of ordinary newspaper type, would stretch from New York to Hollywood, California! -
Andrew Wiles makes brilliant attempt to prove that Fermat's Last Theorem is True
A failed attempt in 1993 gave Wiles the crucial idea for circumventing rather than closing the gap in his previous attempt. -
Johann Heinrich Lambert proves that π is irrational
Lambert was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer. -
Al-Khwarizmi is born
His algebra treatise Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala gives us the word algebra and can be considered as the first book to be written on algebra.
