The Middle Ages

Leader: Joelyn O. Gayo BSED E-1

Members: Nicole U. Maunes BSED E-1

LaRIZA P. Jualo BSED E-1

Mariele Jane P. Bandibas BSED E-1

Lesjay Marie T. Bodoy BSED E-1

MEDIEVAL MATHEMATICS

During the centuries in which the Chinese, Indian and Islamic mathematicians had been
in the ascendancy, Europe had fallen into the Dark Ages, in which science,
mathematics and almost all intellectual endeavour stagnated. Scholastic scholars only
valued studies in the humanities, such as philosophy and literature.

From the 4th to 12th Centuries, European knowledge and study of arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music was limited mainly to Boethius’ translations of some of the works
of ancient Greek masters such as Nicomachus and Euclid. All trade and calculation was
made using the clumsy and inefficient Roman numeral system, and with an abacus
based on Greek and Roman models.

By the 12th Century, though, Europe, and particularly Italy, was beginning to trade with
the East, and Eastern knowledge gradually began to spread to the West. The great
expansion of trade and commerce in general created a growing practical need for
mathematics, and arithmetic entered much more into the lives of common people and
was no longer limited to the academic realm.

Europe’s first great medieval mathematician was the Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better
known by his nickname Fibonacci. Although best known for the so-called Fibonacci
Sequence of numbers, perhaps his most important contribution to European
mathematics was his role in spreading the use of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system
throughout Europe early in the 13th Century, which soon made the Roman numeral
system obsolete, and opened the way for great advances in European mathematics.

The German scholar Regiomontatus was perhaps the most capable mathematician of
the 15th Century, his main contribution to mathematics being in the area of
trigonometry. He helped separate trigonometry from astronomy, and it was largely
through his efforts that trigonometry came to be considered an independent branch of
mathematics. His book “De Triangulis”, in which he described much of the basic
trigonometric knowledge which is now taught in high school and college, was the first
great book on trigonometry to appear in print.

Mention should also be made of Nicholas of Cusa (or Nicolaus Cusanus), a 15th
Century German philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, whose prescient ideas
on the infinite and the infinitesimal directly influenced later mathematicians like Gottfried
Leibniz and Georg Cantor. He also held some distinctly non-standard intuitive ideas
about the universe and the Earth’s position in it, and about the elliptical orbits of the
planets and relative motion, which foreshadowed the later discoveries of Copernicus
and Kepler.

Mathematics in Religion

Geometry is used in the developments of some religious designs used during that time
which some are even used until today. By infusing Mathematics, their works of art
became full of symbolisms and meanings. During Medieval times, people use different
geometric symbols to defy their religious ideas and beliefs as much as words do.