Math Club 2022 draft Rane(58th-115th)

58. Incan Quipu

Quipu are a recording system that was used by
the Incan civilisation in South America around
1400 – 1560. They consist of many strings with
small knots, all of which are attached to one
larger rope. The type and position of the knots,
as well as the colour of the strings, was used to
record numbers, dates and maybe even text.
The Incans used a decimal number system like
we do today. The position of a knot indicates
the place value (ones, tens, hundreds, …). Different types of knots (e.g. figure-8 knots and
long-knots) represents the digit from 0 to 9.

59. Johann Müller Regiomontanus

(Johann Müller Regiomontanus (1436 – 1476) was a German mathematician and
astronomer. He made great advances in both fields, including creating detailed astronomical
tables and publishing multiple textbooks.

60. Luca Pacioli

Luca Pacioli was an influential Italian friar and mathematician, who invented the
standard symbols for plus and minus (+ and –). He was one of the first accountants in
Europe, where he introduced double-entry book-keeping. Pacioli collaborated with
Leonardo da Vinci, and also wrote about arithmetic and geometry.

61. Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was an Italian artist and polymath. His interests ranged from painting,
sculpting and architecture to engineering, mathematics, anatomy, astronomy, botany and cartography. He is
often seen as the prime example of a “Universal Genius” and was one of the most diversely talented
individuals ever to have lived.
Leonardo was born in Vinci, educated in Florence, and worked in Milan, Rome, Bologna, and Venice. Only
15 of his paintings have survived, but among them are some of the best known and most reproduced works
in the world, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
His notebooks contain a vast number of drawings, inventions, and scientific diagrams – including the first
flying machines and helicopters, hydraulic pumps, bridges, and much more.
62. Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was a Polish mathematician, astronomer and lawyer.
During his life, most people believed in the Geocentric model of the universe, with Earth at
the centre and everything else rotating around it.
Copernicus created a new model, where the sun is at the centre, and Earth moves around it
on a circle. He also predicted that Earth rotates around its axis once every day. Afraid that it
would upset the Catholic church, he only published the model just before his death –
triggering what is now called the Copernican Revolution.
Copernicus also worked as a diplomat and physician, and made important contributions to
economics.

63. Da Vinci’s Polyhedra

When the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli needed illustrations for his book De divina
proportione (published in 1509), he asked Leonardo Da Vinci, a renown artist and former
student.
Da Vinci created 60 different images of polyhedra. He often made a solid version, as well as a
transparent version that only shows the edges, which was a completely new way to
represent these 3-dimensional solids.

64. Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia

Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia (1499 – 1557) was an Italian mathematician, engineer and
bookkeeper. He published the first Italian translations of Archimedes and Euclid, found a
formula for solving any cubic equation (including the first real application of complex
numbers), and used mathematics to investigate the projectile motion of cannonballs.

65. Gerolamo Cardano

The Italian Gerolamo Cardano (1501 – 1576) was one of the most influential mathematicians and

scientists of the Renaissance. He investigated hypercycloids, published Tartaglia’s and Ferrari’s

solution for cubic and quartic equations, was the first European to systematically use negative

numbers, and even acknowledged the existence of imaginary numbers (based on √−1).

Cardano also made some early progress in probability theory and introduced binomial coefficients

and binomial theorem to Europe. He invented many mechanical devices, including combination

locks, gyroscopes with three degrees of freedom, and drive shafts (or Cardan shafts) that are still

used in vehicles today.

66. Pedro Nunes
Pedro Nunes (1502 – 1578) was a Portuguese mathematician and astronomer. As Royal
Cosmographer of Portugal he taught navigational skills to many sailors and explorers.
Nunes first noticed that if a ship always follows the same compass bearing, it won’t travel on
a straight line or great circle. Instead, it will follow a path called a rhumb line or loxodrome,
which spirals towards the North or South pole.
Nunes also tried to calculate which day in the year has the fewest hours of sunlight, he
disproved previous attempts to solve classical geometry problems like trisecting an angle,
and he invented a system for measuring fractional parts of angles.

67. Aztec Dates from Codex Mendoza

The Codex Mendoza is a description of the Aztec civilisation, which was commissioned in
1541 by Antonio de Mendoza. Its three sections explain the history and daily life of the Aztec
people and list the different rulers and towns that were conquered.
The codex also contains examples of the Aztec calendar system, which you can see along the
blue bar. Each of the symbols represents a date, and consists of a small image combined
with several small circles.
The Aztec calendar used 20 day signs represented by a small image (crocodile, wind, house,
lizard, snake, rabbit, water, etc.), together with up to 13 circles. This gives a cycle of 20 × 13 =
260 days.
Can you see which dates are be represented by the symbols on this page?

68. François Viète

(1540 – 1603) was a French mathematician, lawyer, and advisor to Kings Henry III and IV of France. He
made significant advances in Algebra, and first introduced the use of letters to represent variables.
Viète discovered the connection between the roots and coefficients of a polynomial, called Viète's formula.
He also wrote books about geometry and trigonometry, including calculating π to 10 decimal places using a
polygon with 393216 sides.

69. Simon Stevin

(1548 – 1620) was Flemish mathematician and engineer. He was one of the first people to use and

write about decimal fractions, and made many other contributions to science and engineering.

70. John Napier

(1550 – 1617) was a Scottish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. He invented
logarithms, popularised the use of the decimal point, and created “Napier’s bones”, a
manual calculating device that helped with multiplication and division.
71. Galileo Galilei
(1564 – 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer. He used one of the first
telescopes to make observations of the night sky, where he discovered the four largest
moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, sunspots, and much more.
Galileo, sometimes called the “father of modern science”, also studied the motion of objects
in free fall, kinematics, material science, and invented the thermoscope (an early
thermometer).
He was a vocal proponent of Heliocentrism, the idea that the Sun was at the centre of our
solar system. This eventually led to him being tried by the Catholic Inquisition: Galileo was
forced to recant and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

72. Johannes Kepler

(1571 – 1630) was a German astronomer and mathematician. He was the imperial

mathematician in Prague, and he is best known for his three laws of planetary motion. Kepler
also worked in optics, and invented an improved telescope for his observations.

73. Marin Mersenne

(1588 – 1648) was a French mathematician and priest. Because of the frequent exchanges
with his contacts in the scientific world during the 17th century, he has been called the “the
post-box of Europe”.
Today we mostly remember him for the Mersenne primes, prime numbers that can be
written as 2n−1. Most of the largest known primes are of this type. He also studied acoustics
and the harmonics of a vibrating string, and wrote about theology and philosophy.

74. Girard Desargues

(1591 – 1661) was a French mathematician, engineer, and architect. He designed numerous
buildings in Paris and Lyon, helped construct a dam, and invented a mechanism for raising
water using epicycloids.
In mathematics, Desargues is considered the father of projective geometry. This is a special
kind of geometry in which parallel lines meet at at “point at infinity”, the size of shapes does
not matter (only their proportions), and all four conic sections (circle, ellipse, parabola and
hyperbola) are essentially the same.
75. René Descartes
(1596 – 1650) was a French mathematician and philosopher, and one of the key figures in the
Scientific Revolution. He refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers, and one of
his best-known quotes is “I think, therefore I am”.
Descartes is the father of analytical geometry, which allows us to describe geometric shapes
using algebra. This was one of the prerequisites, which allowed Newton and Leibnitz to
invent calculus a few decades later.
He is credited with the first use of superscripts for powers or exponents, and the cartesian
coordinate system is named after him.

76. Bonaventura Cavalieri

Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598 – 1647) was an Italian mathematician and monk. He developed
a precursor to infinitesimal calculus, and is remembered for Cavalieri’s principle to find the
volume of solids in geometry.
Cavalieri also worked in optics and mechanics, introduced logarithms to Italy, and
exchanged many letters with Galileo Galilei.

77. Pierre de Fermat

(1607 – 1665) was a French mathematician and lawyer. He was an early pioneer of calculus,
as well as working in number theory, probability, geometry and optics.
In 1637, he wrote a short note in the margin of one of his textbooks, claiming that the
equation an+bn=cn has no integer solutions for n>2, and that he had a “marvellous proof,
which this margin is too narrow to contain”. This became known as Fermat’s Last Theorem,
and one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics – until it was finally proven
in 1994.

78. Jonh Wallis

The English mathematician John Wallis (1616 – 1703) contributed to the development of
calculus, invented the number line and the symbol ∞ for infinity, and served as chief
cryptographer for Parliament and the royal court.

79. Blaise Pascal

(1623 – 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist and philosopher. He invented some of
the first mechanical calculators, as well as working on projective geometry, probability and
the physics of the vacuum.
Most famously, Pascal is remembered for naming Pascal’s Triangle, an infinite triangle of
numbers with some amazing properties.
80. Seki Takakazu
(関 孝和, 1642 – 1708) was an important Japanese mathematician and writer. He created a
new algebraic notation system and studied Diophantine equations. He also developed on
infinitesimal calculus – independently of Leibniz and Newton in Europe.
His work laid foundations for a distinct type of Japanese mathematics, known as wasan (和
算), which was continued by his successors.

81. Sir Isaac Newton

(1642 – 1726) was an English physicist, mathematician, and astronomer, and one of the most
influential scientists of all time. He was a professor at Cambridge University, and president of
the Royal Society in London.
In his book Principia Mathematica, Newton formulated the laws of motion and gravity, which
laid the foundations for classical physics and dominated our view of the universe for the next
three centuries.
Among many other things, Newton was one of the inventors of calculus, built the first
reflecting telescope, calculated the speed of sound, studied the motion of fluids, and
developed a theory of colour based on how prisms split sunlight into a rainbow-coloured
spectrum.

82. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

(1646 – 1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher. Among many other
achievements, he was one of the inventors of calculus, and created some of the first
mechanical calculators.
Leibniz believed that our universe is the “best possible universe” that God could have
created, while allowing us to have a free will. He was a great advocate of rationalism, and
also made contributions to physics, medicine, linguistics, law, history, and many other
subjects.

83. Giovanni Ceva

(1647 – 1734) was an Italian mathematician, physicist, and hydraulic engineer. One of his
most enduring contributions to mathematics is Ceva’s Theorem, about the relationship
between different line segments in a triangle. However, its publication in De lineis rectis was
recieved with little fanfair, and his discoveries weren’t fully recognized until the 1800s.
84. Jacob Bernoulli
(1655 – 1705) was a Swiss mathematician, and one of the many important scientists in the
Bernoulli family. In fact, he had a deep academic rivalry with several of his brothers and sons.
Bernoulli made significant advances to the calculus that was invented by Newton and
Leibnitz, created the field of calculus of variations, discovered the fundamental constant e,
developed techniques for solving differential equations, and much more.
He published the first substantial work about probability, including permutations,
combinations and the law of large numbers, he proved the binomial theorem, and derived
many of the properties of Bernoulli numbers.

85. Abraham de Moivre

(1667 – 1754) was a French mathematician who worked in probability and analytic
geometry. He is most remembered for de Moivre’s formula, which links trigonometry and
complex numbers.
De Moivre discovered the formula for the normal distribution in probability, and first
conjectured the central limit theorem. He also found a non-recursive formula for Fibonacci
numbers, linking them to the golden ratio φ.

86. Robert Simson

(1687 – 1768) was a Scottish mathematician who studied ancient Greek geometers. He
studied at the University of Glasgow, and later returned as a professor.
The Simson line in a triangle is named after him, which can be constructed using the
circumcircle.

87. Christian Goldbach

(1690 – 1764) was a Prussian mathematician and contemporary of Euler, Leibniz and
Bernoulli. He was tutor of Russian Tsar Peter II, and is remembered for his “Goldbach
Conjecture“.

88. Daniel Bernoulli

(1700 – 1782) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist. He was one of the many famous
scientists from the Bernoulli family – including his father Johann, his uncle Jacob, and his
brother Nicholas.
Daniel Bernoulli showed that as the speed of a fluid increases, its pressure decreases. Now
called Bernoulli’s principle, this is the mechanism used by airplane wings and combustion
engines. He also made important discoveries in probability and statistics, and first
encountered Bessel functions.
At the age of 34, he was banned from his father’s house for beating him at an award from the
Paris Academy, for which they both submitted an entry.
89. Émilie du Châtelet
(1706 – 1749) was a French scientist and mathematician. As a women, she was often
excluded from the scientific community, but she built friendships with renown scholars, and
had a long affair with the philosopher Voltaire.
She applied her mathematical ability while gambling, and used her winnings to buy books
and laboratory equipment, and made important advanced regarding the concepts like
energy and energy conservation.
Around the age of 42, Du Châtelet became pregnant again. At the time, without adequate
healthcare, this was very dangerous for women of her age. She was also working on a French
translation of Newton’s book Principia, which containes the basic laws of physics.
Du Châtelet was determined to finish the translation, as well as a detailed commentary with
additions and clarifications, and often worked 18 hours per day. She died just a few days
after giving birth to a daughter, but her completed work was published posthumously, and is
still used today.

90. Leonhard Euler

(1707 – 1783) was one the greatest mathematicians in history. His work spans all areas of
mathematics, and he wrote 80 volumes of research.
Euler was born in Switzerland and studied in Basel, but lived most of his life in Berlin, Prussia,
and St. Petersburg, Russia.
Euler invented much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, and made
important discoveries in calculus, analysis, graph theory, physics, astronomy, and many
other topics.

91. Maria Gaetana Agnesi

(1718 – 1799) was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian.
Agnesi was the first western woman to write a mathematics textbook. She was also the first
woman to be appointed professor at a university.
Her textbook, the Analytical Institutions for the use of Italian youth combined differential and
integral calculus, and was an international success.
𝑎3
Agnesi also studied a bell-shaped curve described by the equation 𝑦 = 2 2 . This function
𝑎 +𝑥
is now called the Witch of Agnesi. The strange name might come from a pun in the Italian
language, were the word “versiera” for “witch” sounds similar to the ropes used when
sailing.
92. Johann Lambert
(1728 – 1777) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer and philosopher. He was the
first to prove that π is an irrational number, and he introduced hyperbolic trigonometric
functions. Lambert also worked on geometry and cartography, created map projections, and
foreshadowed the discovery of non-Euclidean spaces.

93. Benjamin Banneker

(1731 – 1806) was one of the first African-American mathematicians, and both his parents were former
slaves. He was largely self-educated, worked as a surveyor, farmer, and scientist, and wrote several
successful “almanacs” about astronomy.
At the age of 21, Banneker designed and built a wooden clock. He helped survey the land that would later
become the District of Columbia, the capital of the United States, and he accurately predicting a solar
eclipse in 1791.
Banneker also shared some of his work with Thomas Jefferson, then US secretary of state, to argue against
slavery.

94. Joseph-Louis Lagrange

(1736 – 1813) was an Italian mathematician who succeeded Leonard Euler as the director of
the Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
He worked on analysis and the calculus of variations, invented new methods for solving
differential equations, proved theorems in number theory, and laid the foundations of group
theory.
Lagrange also wrote about classical and celestial mechanics, and helped establish the metric
system in Europe.

95. Gaspard Monge

(1746 – 1818) was a French mathematician. He is considered the father of differential
geometry, having introduced the concept of lines of curvature on surfaces in three-
dimensional space (e.g. on a sphere). Monge also invented orthographic
projection and descriptive geometry, which allows the representation of three-dimensional
objects using two-dimensional drawings.
During the French Revolution, Monge served as Minister of the Marine. He helped reform the
French education system and found the École Polytechnique.
96. Pierre-Simon Laplace
(1749 – 1827) was a French mathematician and scientist. He is sometimes called the
“Newton of France”, because of his wide range of interests, and the enormous impact of his
work.
In a five-volume book, Laplace translated problems in celestial mechanics
from geometry to calculus. This opened up a wide range of new strategies for understanding
our universe. He proposed that the solar system developed from a rotating disk of dust.
Laplace also pioneered the field of probability, and showed how probability can help us
understand data from the physical world.

97. Lorenzo Mascheroni

(1750 – 1800) was an Italian mathematician and son of a wealthy landowner. He was
ordained to priesthood at the age of 17, and taught rhetoric as well as physics and
mathematics.
After writing a book about structural engineering, he was appointed professtor of
mathematics at the university of Pavia. Mascheroni proved that all Euclidean constructions
that can be done with compass and straightedge can also be done with just a compass: this
is now known as the Mohr–Mascheroni theorem.
Even more famously, the Euler-Mascheroni constant γ = 0.57721…, which appears in analysis
and number theory, is named after him. He wrote about it in 1790 and calculated 32 of its
digits (although with a few mistakes).

98. Adrien-Marie Legendre

(1752 – 1833) was an important French mathematician. He studied elliptic integrals and their
usage in physics. He also found a simple proof that π is irrational, and the first proof that π2 is
irrational.

99. Wang Zhenyi

(王贞仪, 1768 – 1797) was a Chinese scientist and mathematician living during the Qing
dynasty. Despite laws and customs preventing women from receiving higher education, she
studied subjects like astronomy, mathematics, geography and medicine.
In her books and articles, Wang wrote about trigonometry and Pythagoras’ theorem, studied
solar and lunar eclipses, and explained many other celestial phenomena.
100. Joseph Fourier
(1768 – 1830) was a French mathematician, and a friend and advisor of Napoleon. In addition
to his mathematical research, he is also credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.
While travelling to Egypt, Fourier became particularly fascinated with heat. He studied heat
transfer and vibrations, and discovered that any periodic function can be written as an
infinite sum of trigonometric functions: a Fourier series.

101. Marie-Sophie Germain

(1776 – 1831) decided that she wanted to be a mathematician at the age of 13, after reading about
Archimedes. Unfortunately, as a woman, she was faced with significant opposition. Her parents tried to
prevent her from studying when she was young, and she never received a post at a university.
Germain was a pioneer in understanding the mathematics of elastic surfaces, for which she won the grand
prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences. She also made considerable progress in solving Fermat’s Last
Theorem, and regularly corresponded with Carl Friedrich Gauss.

102. Carl Friedrich Gauss

(1777 – 1855) was arguably the greatest mathematician in history. He made groundbreaking
discoveries in just about every field of mathematics, from algebra and number theory to
statistics, calculus, geometry, geology and astronomy.
According to legend, he corrected a mistake in his father‘s accounting at the age of 3, and
found a way to quickly add up all integers from 1 to 100 at the age of 8. He made his first
important discoveries while still a teenager, and later tutored many other famous
mathematicians as Professor.

103. Mary Somerville

(1780 – 1872) was a Scottish scientist and writer. In her obituary, she was called the “Queen
of Science”. Somerville first suggested the existence of Neptune and was also an excellent
writer and communicator of science.

104. Augustin-Louis Cauchy

(1789 – 1857) was a French mathematician and physicist. He contributed to a wide range of
areas in mathematics, and dozens of theorems are named after him.
Cauchy formalised calculus and analysis, by reformulating and proving results where
previous mathematicians were much more careless and imprecise. He founded the field
of complex analysis, studied permutation groups, and worked on optics, fluid dynamics and
elasticity theory.
105. August Ferdinand Möbius
(1790 – 1868) was a German mathematician and astronomer. He studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss in
Göttingen and is best known for his discovery of the Möbius strip: a non-orientable two-dimensional
surface with only one side. (However, it was independently discovered by Johann Benedict Listing just a few
months earlier.)
Many other concepts in mathematics are named after him, including the Möbius plane, Möbius
transformations, the Möbius function μ(n) in number theory, and the Möbius configuration of two mutually
inscribed tetrahedra.

106. Charles Babbage

(1791 – 1871) was a British mathematician, philosopher and engineer. He is often called the
“father of the computer”, having invented the first mechanical computer (the Difference
engine), and an improved, programmable version (the Analytical Engine).
In theory, these machines could automatically perform certain calculations stored on cards
or tape. However, due to the high production costs, they were never fully completed during
Babbage’s lifetime. In 1991, a functional replica was constructed at the Science Museum in
London.

107. Nikolai Lobachevsky

(Никола́й Лобаче́вский, 1792 – 1856) was a Russian mathematician, and one of the founders
of non-Euclidean geometry. He managed to show that you can build up a consistent type of
geometry in which Euclid’s fifth axiom (about parallel lines) does not hold.

108. János Bolyai

(1802 – 1860) was a Hungarian mathematician, and one of the founders of non-Euclidean
geometry – a geometry in which Euclid’s fifth axiom about parallel lines does not hold. This
was a significant breakthrough in mathematics. Unfortunately for Bolyai, the
mathematicians Gauss and Lobachevsky discovered similar results at the same time, and
received most of the credit.

109. Niels Henrik Abel

(1802 – 1829) was an important Norwegian mathematician. Even though he died at the age of
26, he made groundbreaking contributions to a wide range of topics.
At the age of 16, Abel proved the binomial theorem. Three years later, he proved that it is
impossible to solve quintic equations – by independently inventing group theory. This had
been an open problem for over 350 years! He also worked on elliptic functions and
discovered Abelian functions.
Abel spent his life in poverty: he had six siblings, his father died when he was 18, he was
unable to find a job at a university, and many mathematicians initially dismissed his work.
Today, one of the highest awards in mathematics, the Abel Prize is named after him.

110. William Rowan Hamilton

(1805 – 1865) was an Irish mathematician and child prodigy. He invented quaternions, the
first example of a “non-commutative algebra”, which has important applications in
mathematics, physics and computer science.
He first came up with the idea while walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin, and carved the
fundamental formula into a stone bridge he passed: i2=j2=k2=ijk=−1.
Hamilton also made significant contributions to physics, including optics and Newtonian
mechanics.

111. Augustus De Morgan

(1806 – 1871) was a British mathematician and logician. He studied the geometric properies
of complex numbers, formalised mathematical induction, suggested quaternions, and came
up with new mathematical notation.
The De Morgan laws explain how to transform
logical relationships in set theory, for
example A∩B‾=A‾∪B‾ and A∪B‾=A‾∩B‾.

112. Carl Jacobi

(1804 – 1851) was a German mathematician. He worked on analysis, differential equations
and number theory, and was one of the pioneers in the study of elliptic functions.

113. Évariste Galois

The French mathematician Évariste Galois (1811 – 1832) had a short and tragic life, yet he
invented two entirely new fields of mathematics: Group theory and Galois theory.
While still in his teens, Galois proved that there is no general solution for polynomial
equations of degree five or higher – simultaneously with Niels Abel.
Unfortunately, other mathematicians who he shared these discoveries with repeatedly
misplaced or simply returned his work, and he failed his school and university exams while
concentrating on much more complex work.
At the age of 20, Galois was shot in a duel (some say a feud over a woman), and later died of
his wounds. During the night before his death, he summarised his mathematical discoveries
in a letter to a friend. It would take other mathematicians many years to fully understand
these letters, and realise the impact of his work.
120. Richard Dedekind
(1831 – 1916) was a German mathematician and one of the students of Gauss. He developed many concepts
in set theory, and invented Dedekind cuts as the formal definition of real numbers. He also gave the first
definitions of number fields and rings, two important constructs in abstract algebra.

121. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

(1832 – 1898) is best know under his pen name Lewis Carroll, as the author of Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass.
However, Carroll was also a brilliant mathematician. He always tried to incorporate puzzles
and logic into his children’s stories, making them more enjoyable and memorable.