Indian Mathematicians
Chinese Mathematician
Islamic Mathematicians
Miscellaneous
Mathematics
100
Aryabhata
Who is a 6th century mathematician from Bihar (northeast corner of India, between Nepal and Bhutan). He wrote a collection of problems that gives evidence of the base 10 place value number system already in use in India.
100
Yang Hui
Who is one of the greatest Chinese mathematicians of the 13th century. His most famous book, Hsiang Chieh Suan Fa (Yang Hui's Computational Methods), included Pascal's triangle, arithmetic, solutions of quadratic equations, magic squares and magic circles.
100
Abu Kamil
Who is the 9th century Egyptian who credits Al Kwarizmi as the creator of algebra and comments on the work of Al Kwarizmi. He may have inspired the work of Fibonacci and he independently of Diophantus solves indeterminant equations such as 3x-2y=1.
100
570-632
What are the years that Mohammed lived. Born in Mecca, he received his first revelation in 610, and preached a new religion of submission to one God. Islam translates as submission, and the Qur'an is a collection of all the revelations of Mohammed. Prior to Mohammed, Mecca was a center for caravan trade and its people worshipped many deities. Mohammed was a merchant.
100
Whose system of numbering utilizes notions of decimal place value?
What is the Chinese system. They had symbols for 1-9, and to write larger numbers, the number of 10s, 100s, 1000s, etc. is written with a place value symbol. For example, using T=10, H=100, then they would have written 3H for 300 or 4H 2T 5 for 425.
200
Brahmagupta
Who is the 7th century mathematician who major book, "The Open of the Universe", includes (1) an explanation of zero and the properties of arithmetic with zero and (2) the arithmetic of negative numbers. We should note that he claimed that 0 divided by 0 equals 0, and that n divided by 0 equals a fraction n/0.
200
Liu Hang
Who is the 3rd century mathematician who lived at the end of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E. - 220 C.E.) who wrote the "Sea Island Mathematical Manual". This work is essentially about surveying, and includes practical problems like that of finding the height of an island. Liu Hang also approximated pi using inscribed polygons up to 192 sides. His value was 3.141024.
200
ibn Labban (971-1029)
Who is the Persian mathematician and geographer from Gilan, the once-poor region in northern Iran, lying along the southwestern edge of the Caspian sea. Gilan became wealthy in the 15th century with the introduction of silk production. ibn Labban played a major role in the development of trigonometry, and his book "Principles of Hindu Reckoning" tells us about medieval Indian computations.
200
Multiply the diameter by 62,832, then divide by 20,000.
What is one of al Khwarizmi's formulas for the circumference of a circle. Another was "multiply the diameter by 3 and 1/7".
200
Horner's Method
What is the method used by both the Chinese and Theon of Alexandria (mid 300s C.E.) to find nth roots. Both methods rely on solving a binomial equation of the form (a+b)^n=K where a^n approximates K.
300
Bhaskara Atscharja (Bhaskara "The Teacher")
Who is the 12th century mathematician who wrote two important books. Vija Ganita (Seed Counting) is the more advanced including statements about positive and negative roots, the concept of extraneous roots, and corrected the earlier confusion about division by zero.
300
Sun Zi
Who is the 5th century mathematician who wrote "Sunzi Suanjing (Master Sun's Mathematical Manual)" in which he poses and solves the popular problem on multiples: "Suppose we have an unknown number of objects. If counted by 3s, two remain; if counted by 5s, three remain; if counted by 7s, two remain. How many objects are there?
300
Al-Kashi
Who is the 14th century mathematician who gets credit for the first treatise on finding 5th roots, "The Calculator's Key". A 10th century book by al-Buzjani about 3rd and 4th roots was lost. Likewise the book of the Persian mathematician Umar al-Khayyami (a.k.a. Omar Khayyam(1048-1141 C.E.).
300
The 4th Crusade in 1204.
What is reason that many of the books from antiquity were destroyed in Constantinople. It's known that the 9th century, Emperor Leo VI re-opened the University of Constantinople and gathered copies of the works of Archimedes. These and many other works are suspected to have disappeared. The Pope contracted Venice for ships for 33,000. When he couldn't pay, the Venetians made a deal that they first sack Constantinople. In 1212 Geneo was the launch site of the "Children's Crusade" when 7000 children were recruited in Europe, placed on ships, and "never seen again". This is the basis for the story of the Pied Piper.
300
sqrt((s-a)(s-b)(s-c)(s-c)) where s = (a+b+c+d)/2
What is Brahmagupta's formula for the area of the quadrilateral with sides a,b,c and d. This formula is true for all quadrilaterals inscribed in a circle, the so-called "cyclic quadrilaterals". It is not true for all quadrilaterials. Squares, rectangles, and isosceles quadrilaterals are cyclic, and kites are cyclic iff they have 2 right angles. This formula is like Heron's formula for the area of a triangle: Area = sqrt(s(s-a)(s-b)(s-c)) where s=(a+b+c)/2. That formula is true for all triangles.
400
Mahavira
Who is the 9th century mathematician, from Mysore in the western side of the southern tip of Indian, who gave the correct formula for the number of combinations of n things taken k at a time.
400
Li Zhi or Li Ye
Who is 13th century mathematician who was driven out by the Mongol invasion. Li Zhi wrote "Yuan Hai Jing (Sea Mirror of Circle Measurement)", a set of problems set around a town surrounded by a circular wall. They include problems whose algebraic solutions require quadratic and higher degree polynomials.
400
Al Khwarizmi
Who is 9th century mathematician from Merv, a main city on the silk route, east of the Caspian Sea and north of Afghanistan, dating back to the 3rd millennium B.C.E. and briefly in the 12th century, the largest city in the world at 200,000. Al Khwarizami was on of the scholars at the "House of Wisdom", translated the work of Brahmagupta, and his name is the origin of our modern word, algorithm.
400
Ulugh Beg
Who is the grandson of Tamerlane, the 14th century khan who ruled Persia and tried to conquer parts of India and Russia. Tamerlane is remembered for a sack of 70,000 heads made to discourage revolt. Ulugh Beg established a madrasah in Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan) and invited scholars such as al-Kashi to speak. The two collaborated on trigonometry, and Ulugh Beg made corrections to Ptolemy's tables of sines and tangents.
400
The hypotenuse of the shadow.
What was the secant until about the 17th century. By the time of the 13th century Persian mathematician Nasir Eddin, trigonometric quantities were half-chord lengths (jiba) versus chords or shadow lengths of Ptolemy's times. Our names of sine and cosine comes from the pairing of every angle with its complement, what was known in the Islamic era as shadows of a rod perpendicular to the ground (sine) or perpendicular to a wall (sine of the complementary angle).
500
Baudhayana
Who was one of the Vedic mathematicians of Indian from the 9th century. He was the first to record constructions for the altars and to the construction for squaring the areas of two squares.
500
Zhu Shijie
Who is probably the greatest medieval Chinese mathematician from the early 14th century. Some use his name as evidence that Marco Polo didn't go to China, as Zhu Shijie was so famous and not mentioned by Marco Polo. His book, "Precious Mirror", opens with rows from Pascal's triangle beyond what was known, and considers problems up to 4 variables.
500
Banu Musa
Who were the 9th century "sons of Musa", Muhammad & al Hasan, whose work with the conics made them famous in the early years of the "House of Wisdom". The surviving copies of Apollonius's Conics had many errors, and the brothers had to rediscover the properties of the conics.
500
Half of 1 is 5 in "the place before".
What did the Islamic scribe al-Uqlididi write to describe a purely decimal fraction. This appears in his "Book of Chapters" and appeared about 952 in Damascus.
500
[1;2,2,2,2,...]
What is one representation for the continued fraction representing the square root of 2. Suzuki mentions it while discussing the Indian Vedic mathematicians and their representation of a number that would scale the size of a square to be double the area of an original.
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