Egypt and Mesopotamia
This writing system used in Mesopotamia was named after the tool they used to imprint on clay tablets.
What is Cuneiform?
Euclid lived in the city named for this Macedonian Leader.
Who is Alexander the Great?
Indian mathematics was often passed down in this poetic tradition, where equations are given as verses consisting of words having 1 or 2 syllables.
What is "Vedic" Tradition?
This Greek thinker is hailed as the "father of algebra" for being the first to represent equations symbolically.
Who is Diophantus?
What a prime group of people! The Academia Parisiensis was a group of natural philosophers in Paris organized by this man.
Who is Marin Mersenne?
When working with the methods such as false position, this is the word that Ancient Egyptians used to represent an unknown quantity, and roughly translates to "heap".
What is "Aha"?
Book I of Euclid's "Elements" culminates in two propositions corresponding to this theorem, and its converse.
What is the Pythagorean Theorem?
This Islamic thinker found a method to solve cubic equations and trisect angles using conic sections.
Who is Omar Khayyam?
In the Brahma Sphuta Sidhanta, Brahmagupta gave the first complete proof of this formula, including solutions for both positive and negative roots.
What is the quadratic formula?
Although this arrangement of binomial coefficients is named after a member of the Academia, it was originally described by Islamic and Chinese mathematicians in the 10th-11th century.
What is Pascal's Triangle?
The Babylonian artifact with this name (and number) has listings of over a dozen Pythagorean triples, along with ratios between the entries.
What is Plimpton 322?
Out of the 5 platonic solids Euclid constructed in book XIII, Euclid saved the construction of this solid for last, as its faces would be the hardest to construct.
What is the dodecahedron?
One key precursor to modern trigonometry - a table of half-chords - can be found in this Indian work from 510 CE, whose author has a similar sounding name.
What is the Aryabhatiya?
This man further studied the Casus Irreducibilis and attempted to show how imaginary numbers could be treated arithmetically the same as any other sums with square roots.
Who is Rafael Bombelli?
Cartesian coordinates are named after Rene Descartes and were first described in this work in 1637.
What is La Geometrie?
Ahmose must have been greedy! This is how the fraction 2/5 is represented in his table of fractions of the form 2/n.
What is 1/3 + 1/15?
These two antonyms, defined by Euclid in book X, are the precursors to the terms "rational" and "irrational".
What are commesurable and incommesurable.
Hindu numerals spread through the Islamic world in large part due to this man's work "On Calculations with Hindu Numerals" as well as his follow-up work "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"
Who is Al-Khwarizmi?
Daily Double!
He was the first to show that there is no quintic formula using radicals.
Who is Niels Henrik Abel?
In Methodus ad disquirendam maximam et minimam et de tangentibus linearum curvarum, Fermat used this method to find when the slope of a curve was equal to 0 in order to maximize or minimize the value of a given polynomial.
What is adequality?
Using the Babylonian algorithm, we can approximate the square root of 11 using this sexigesimal number.
What is 03;20 (or 3,20)?
This is how to construct a square from a given straight line in 30 seconds or less.
What is straight-edge and compass construction?
Among his many achievements was a rapidly convergent formula for 1/pi and an asymptotic formula for the partition funcion.
Who is Srinivasa Ramanujan?
This is a real solution to x^3 = 5x - 2.
What is x = 2?
He was able to use a cosine curve and Cavalieri's principle to find the quadrature of the cycloid.
Who is Gilles de Roberval?