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Period: 3000 BCE to 500 BCE
Egypt
The geometry of Egypt was mostly derived of rules and they used this method mostly for dividing land and to do tax for landowners. They had measures of rope to measure lengths. There is no logical fact that they knew geometric facts or that they even knew a form of Pythagorean Theorem -
Period: 2000 BCE to 500 BCE
Ancient babylon
The Sumerians developed writing in cuniform on clay tablets and arithmetics using a “base number system“. The Babylonians adopted both methods but Babylonian math was beyond arithmetics. They developed basic ideas in number theory, algebra, and geometry -
Period: 2000 BCE to 3000 BCE
china
The simple but efficient ancient Chinese numbering system, which dates back to at least the 2nd millennium BCE, used small bamboo rods arranged to represent the numbers 1 to 9, which were then places in columns representing units, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc -
Period: 1500 BCE to 200 BCE
india
Histories of Indian mathematics used to begin by describing the geometry contained in the Sulbasutras but research into the history of Indian mathematics has shown that the essentials of this geometry were older being contained in the altar constructions described in the Vedic mythology text the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Taittiriya Samhita. -
Period: 569 BCE to 475 BCE
Pythagorus of Samos
Samos is often described as the first pure mathematician. He is an extremely important figure in the development of mathematics yet we know very little about his mathematical achievements. Unlike many later Greek mathematicians at least we have some of the books which they wrote, we have nothing of Pythagoras's writings. The society which he led, half religious and half scientific, followed a code of secrecy which certainly means that today Pythagoras is a mysterious figure. -
Period: 417 BCE to 369 BCE
Theaetetus of Athens
He was a student of Plato's and the creator of solid geometry. He was the first to study the octahedron and the icosahedron, and to construct all five regular solids. His work formed Book XIII of Euclid's Elements. His work about rational and irrational quantities also formed Book X of Euclid -
Period: 408 BCE to 355 BCE
Eudoxus of Cnidus
Foreshadowed algebra by developing a theory of proportion which is presented in Book V of Euclid's Elements in which Definitions 4 and 5 establish Eudoxus' landmark concept of proportion.Eudoxus also did early work on integration using his method of exhaustion by which he determined the area of circles and the volumes of pyramids and cones. This was the first seed from which the calculus grew two thousand years later. -
Period: 380 BCE to 320 BCE
Menaechmus
discovered the conic sections. He was the first to show that ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas are obtained by cutting a cone in a plane not parallel to the base -
Period: 365 BCE to 300 BCE
Euclid
otherwise known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician who is credited as being the Father of Geometry -
Period: 325 BCE to 265 BCE
Euclid of Alexandria
Is best known for his 13 Book treatise "The Elements" collecting the theorems of Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Theaetetus, Eudoxus and other predecessors into a logically connected whole. -
Period: 262 BCE to 190 BCE
Apollonius of Perga
He was called 'The Great Geometer'. His famous work was "Conics" consisting of 8 Books. he studied normal to conics, and determined the center of curvature and the evolute of the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola. In another work he showed how to construct the circle which is tangent to three objects (points, lines or circles). -
Period: 10 to 75
Heron of Alexandria
wrote 3 Books which gives methods for computing areas and volumes. Book 1 considers areas of plane figures and surfaces of 3D objects and contains his now-famous formula for the area of a triangle -
Period: 85 to 165
Claudius Ptolemy
wrote 13 Books giving the mathematics for the geocentric theory of planetary motion. Considered a masterpiece with few peers, the Almagest remained the major work in astronomy for 1400 years until it was superceded by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. -
Period: 290 to 350
Pappus of Alexandria
was the last of the great Greek geometers. His major work in geometry is in 8 Books a handbook on a wide variety of topics: arithmetic, mean proportionals, geometrical paradoxes, regular polyhedra, the spiral and quadratrix, trisection, honeycombs, semiregular solids, minimal surfaces, astronomy, and mechanics -
Period: 370 to 415
Hypatia of Alexandria
was the first woman to make a substantial contribution to the development of mathematics. She learned mathematics and philosophy from her father Theon of Alexandria, and assisted him in writing an eleven part commentary on Ptolemy's Almagest, and a new version of Euclid's Elements -
Period: to
Rene Descartes
Descartes was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche in Anjou. He was pressed by his friends to publish his ideas and, although he was adamant in not publishing Le Monde. -
Period: to
Gaspard Monge
is considered the father of both descriptive geometry in Geometry descriptive. -
Period: to
Jean-Victor Poncelet
was one of the founders of modern projective geometry. He had studied under Monge and Carnot, but after school, he joined Napoleon’s army. -
Period: to
Felix Klein
He is best known for his work on the connections between geometry and group theory. He is best known for his "Erlanger Programm" (1872) that synthesized geometry as the study of invariants under groups of transformations, which is now the standard accepted view -
Period: to
Donald Coxeter
is regarded as the major synthetic geometer of the 20th century, and made important contributions to the theory of polytopes, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory and combinatorics. -