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May 18, 1048
Omar al-Khayyám
Omar is said to be the greatest Islamic mathematician. He discovered a different way to do Euclid's Parallel Postulate.He may have been the first to discover Pascal’s Triangle. He also was a famous astronomer. He measured out the year more accurately than ever, built the Persian calendar, and built a star map. He also proved that the Earth rotates around the Sun. -
slide rule
William Oughtred invents the slide rule -
Christiaan Huygens
Known as the second greatest mechanism of his time, he was more well known for his physical theories and inventions. He created the first reliable pendulum clock, the first balanced springwatch, and invente superior grinding techniques for lenses. He developed the laws of motion before Newton did including including the inverse-square law of gravitation and centripetal force. He also did great work in the field of geometry. Christiaan proved theorems about conic sections, the cycloid, and the -
Takakazu Seki
Seki was a Japanese mathematician that made many discoveries before the Western mathematicians did. He developed determinants, Bernoulli numbers, discriminates, and some methods of calculus. He also wrote out pi to 10 decimal digits. -
Fahrenheit’s thermometer
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Caroline Herschel
Caroline when she was younger was thought to be only good as a maid for her family. She eventually worked with her brother William Herschel in the astronomy field. While working with William she discovered her first comet while he was a way. After this she became her brother’s partner in the astronomy business. She became well known after she was able to calculate their positions of comets, even though she didn’t even know her multiplication tables. -
Cramer’s Rule was established
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Sophie Germain
Sophie was born during a time of revolution. The American revolution was going on and the French Revolution was shortly on its heels. When she was in her teen years she taught herself differential calculus without a tutor. Her biggest breakthroughs were in the number theory. She proved that if x^5 + y^5 = z^5, then either x, ,y ,z must be divisible by 5. -
July 4th, 1776 America declares its independence from Britain.
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Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss
Born in Germany he was know as the greatest theorem prover ever. There are many things he contributed to but this was one of his earliest ones, he proved that the regular n-gon was constructible if n is the product of distinct prime Fermat numbers. He discovered non-Euclidean geometry. -
First President of The United States of America
1788 George Washington is elected the first president of The United States of America. -
Julius Plücker
Julius was born in Germany and is known as one of the greatest geometers. He invented line geometry, enumerative geometry, and geometry of three or more lines. He was overshadowed by his rival, fellow German, Jakob Steiner. He also did work in physics with cathode rays. -
Napoleon
1804 Napoleon becomes emperor of France. -
Ada Byron Lovelace
Daughter of a poet, who her mother separated from so she didn’t become a poet. SHe really liked the idea of machines being used to calculate numbers and wanted to act on these impulses. She proposed an idea to Babbage about creating a plan for an engine to calculate Bernoulli’s numbers. This program is regarded as the first “computer program.” -
Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev
A Russian mathematician who is famous for his theorems. Some of the theorems included in this are a new version of the Law of Large Numbers and first rigorous proof of the Central Limit Theorem. He invented Chebyshev polynomials, and also discovered that there is a prime number between n and 2n. -
Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind
Born in Germany, he was one of the first pioneer the application of group theory to other branches of mathematics. He is responsible for definitions to numerous mathematical terms. He inspired Cantor’s work and without his work Cantor’s set theory would not be complete. -
Mary Everest Boole
Born the Daughter of an English Minister, she was still able to do great things in mathematics lat in her career. She took a job as a librarian at Queens College in England, but was not allowed to teach or receive a degree because women were not allowed to do so at this time. Even though she was unable to teach she was the unofficial advisor to students. Eventually the college realized she had a gift for teaching and was able to teach the students. She invented curve stitching, or string geometr -
Samuel Colt Invents revolver
1836 Samuel Colt invented the first revolver. -
Jean Bernard Léon Foucault
Jean Bernard Léon Foucault invents gyroscope. -
Hertha Marks Ayrton
Born Phoebe Sarah Marks she was born in Portsea, England. She created a draftsman device that was able to divide up a line equally and for enlarging or reducing figures. She became an expert in the electrical arc. In 1906 she received the Hughes medal from the Royal Society of London for her experiments for the electrical arc and sand ripples. -
Charlotte Angas Scott
Charlotte was born in England to a high privileged family. Her mother and father encouraged her to keep studying throughout her teen years and further her education as far as it could go. She had the opportunity to study in the U.S. and took full advantage of that. She created the mathematics program at Bryn Mawr College, held many high positions for mathematical organizations, and she is credited with writing the first research paper to be written in the U.S. to be recognized in Europe. It was -
Giuseppe Peano
Giuseppe is an Italian born mathematician who is often overlooked because of his modesty. He developed definitions for axioms for set theory, and was first to define arithmetic in terms of set theory -
American Civil War
1861-1864 The American Civil War. -
Hermann Minkowski
This Lithuanian started his career off with a bang, at the age of 18 he constructed Einstein’s enumerations of ways to represent integers as the sum of five squares. He was one of Einstein’s teachers. Minkowski space was invented by him. This helped Einstein deal with Special Theory of Relativity. This inspired Einstein develop his General Theory.He was also a pioneer in the study of fractals. -
Grace Chisholm Young
Born in England and studied at Cambridge but was unable to receive her formal degree so she went on to Göttingen in Germany to study with Felix Klein. After much difficulty she received her Ph. D. in mathematics at age 27. She married William Young and together it is said that they reworked and rewrote the field of the theory of functions of real-variable. Her granddaughter, Sylvia Wiegand who is a mathematician at University of Nebraska. -
Anne Bosworth Focke
She was the Rhode Island State College first mathematics professor.She taught algebra, geometry, calculus, and various other physics classes. She received her Ph. D. in 1900 from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in Germany under the study of David Hilbert. She was his first female Ph. D. student. -
Emilie Norton Martin
Born in New Jersey she studied at Byrn Mawr College with majors in Latin and Mathematics. In an issue of American Mathematics Monthly she argued for women to have mathematics required. She said “Without this education women will not be prepared in general life.” This standard is still true to this day. -
Mary Emily Sinclair
Mary was born in Massachusetts and was a professor at Worchester Polytechnic Institute. She was the first woman to receive a Ph. D. in mathematics at University of Chicago in 1908. She published two papers on surfaces of revolution and her dissertation was titled "Concerning a Compound Discontinuous Solution in the Problem of the Surface of Revolution of Minimum Area." -
The light bulb is invented
1883 Edison invents the light bulb -
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov
Andrey was born in Russia and his pursuit of mathematics began with him developing toys that appeared to be perpetual motion machines. At a young age he proved for a Fourier series that it diverges almost everywhere. He is considered the founder of the fields of intuitionistic logic, algorithmic complexity theory, and modern probability theory. He has a couple notions named after him such as the Kolmogorov backward equation, and the Borel-Kolmogorov paradox.
