Famous Mathematicians
His 13-book text was the gold standard of geometry texts for more than 2400 years.
Who was Euclid?
The ancient Babylonians used this base for their counting system.
What is sexagesimal?
This work is one of just a few texts we have showing how the ancient Egyptians did mathematics.
What is the Rhind Papyrus?
This Italian scientist was the first to use a telescope to observe the moons of Jupiter.
Who was Galileo?
This city in Egypt was likely Euclid's home, as well as the location of center of learning during the classical Greek period.
What is Alexandria?
One of the first known mathematicians of the Greek era, he is said to have proved that a circle is bisected by its diameter.
Who was Thales?
Sometimes called the parallel postulate, this axiom says that two lines meet if the sum of their interior angles is less than 2 right angles.
What is Euclid's fifth postulate?
This Greek thinker had an elaborate geocentric model of the solar system that relied on epicycles and equants to account for the various observable motions of the planets.
Who was Ptolemy?
This city in present-day Iraq was home to the important center of learning known as The House of Wisdom.
What is Baghdad?
This mathematician was thought to have hidden his method of discovering theorems about areas and volumes, but the document he wrote describing them was found in the nineteenth century on a palimpsest hidden by a prayer book.
Who was Archimedes?
Newton and Leibniz are credited with discovering calculus because they made a clear connection between the methods of solving these two problems.
What are the area and the tangent problem?
In this work, Archimedes described how to calculate with very large numbers.
What is the Sand Reckoner?
In the 1500s, this Polish scientist proposed the first credible heliocentric model of the solar system since the time of the ancient Greeks.
Who was Copernicus?
Isaac Newton attended university in this town and later held a professorship there.
What is Cambridge?
This French mathematician had a clever method of finding tangents and areas that involved "adequating" quantities that differed by some small, unspecified amount.
Who was Fermat?
The proof of this well-known theorem appears in many texts, including a work by the 3rd-century Chinese mathematician, Liu Hui.
What is the Pythagorean Theorem?
One of the earliest surviving mathematical texts from China, this work explained multiplication and how to write and calculate with fractions.
What is The Nine Chapters?
This ancient Greek thinker proposed that the earth went around the sun.
Aristarchus.
This mathematician from the Islamic era lent his name to a system we use to today for solving algebraic equations.
Who was al-Khwarizmi?
What is a lune?
What was the Astronomia Nova?