South East Asian Institute of Technology, Inc. National Highway, Crossing Rubber, Tupi, South Cotabato

SOUTH EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, INC.
National Highway, Crossing Rubber, Tupi, South Cotabato
GENERAL EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

___________________________________________________
LEARNING MODULE
FOR
MATH 100: HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS
_____________________________________________________
WEEK 13-17
TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

Page 1 of 38
COURSE OUTLINE
COURSE CODE : MATH 100

TITLE : History of Mathematics
TARGET POPULATION : All Bachelor of Secondary Education Major in Mathematics
INSTRUCTOR : MR. ROCKY S. CONSING
Overview:
This course presents the humanistic aspects of mathematics which provides historical
content and timeline that led to the present understanding and applications of the different
branches of mathematics. Topics included in this course are not very technical and rigid
aspects of mathematics; rather they are early, interesting, and light developments of the field.
They are intended to enrich the background of the students in the hope that the students find
value and inspiration in the historical approach to the mathematical concepts.
Objectives:
General Objective
To understand the most significant developments in Mathematics originated as global

answers to interrelated problems posed by different cultures and civilization through the
centuries.
The following are the topics to be discussed
Week 13 MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN MATHEMATICS
Week 14 RENAISSANCE MATHEMATICS
Week 15 MATHEMATICS DURING SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Week 16 CONTINUATION OF MATHEMATICS DURING SCIENTIC

REVOLUTION
Week 17 MODERN AND FUTURE MATHEMATICS
Week 18 FINAL EXAMINATION
Instruction to the Learners
Each chapter in this module contains a major lesson involving the historical development
of mathematics. The units are characterized by continuity, and are arranged in such a manner
that the present unit is related to the next unit. For this reason, you are advised to read this
module. After each unit, there are exercises to be given. Submission of task given will be every
Tuesday during your scheduled class hour.

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WEEK 13
MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN 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, and spent much of their energies
quarrelling over subtle subjects in
metaphysics and theology, such as “How
many angels can stand on the point of a
needle?“
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. Robert of Chester
translated Al-Khwarizmi‘s important book on algebra into Latin in the 12th Century, and the
complete text of Euclid‘s “Elements” was translated in various versions by Adelard of Bath,
Herman of Carinthia and Gerard of Cremona. 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.
The advent of the printing press in the mid-15th Century also had a huge impact.
Numerous books on arithmetic were published for the purpose of teaching business people
computational methods for their commercial needs and mathematics gradually began to
acquire a more important position in education.

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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.
An important (but largely

unknown and underrated)
mathematician and scholar of the
14th Century was the Frenchman
Nicole Oresme. He used a system
of rectangular coordinates
centuries before his
countryman René
Descartes popularized the idea, as
well as perhaps the first time-
speed-distance graph. Also,
leading from his research into
musicology, he was the first to use
fractional exponents, and also
worked on infinite series, being the
first to prove that the harmonic
series 1⁄1 + 1⁄2 + 1⁄3 + 1⁄4 + 1⁄5… is a divergent infinite series (i.e. not tending to a limit, other than
infinity).
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.

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ACTIVITY #13
TASKS:
1. What was the role of mathematics during Medieval European Ages?

> During Medieval times, people use different geometric symbols to defy their religious
ideas and beliefs as much as words do. 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.
The advent of the printing press in the mid-15th Century also had a huge impact.
Numerous books on arithmetic were published for the purpose of teaching business
people computational methods for their commercial needs and mathematics gradually
began to acquire a more important position in education
2. How do Medieval European Mathematics contributions affect the modern world?
> 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.Through the works of great mathematician
works of today’s generation was easier for it provide formula and ideas in completing a
certain task and also give another techniques and perception in facing modern problem.
3. What were the greatest developments of the Medieval European in the field of
mathematics?
> The Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better known by his nickname Fibonacci, was Europe's
first famous medieval mathematician. Although he is best known for the Fibonacci
Number Sequence, his role in spreading the Hindu-Arabic numeral system throughout
Europe early in the 13th Century, which quickly rendered the Roman numeral system
obsolete and paved the way for great advances in European mathematics, was perhaps
his most important contribution to European mathematics. Nicole Oresme, a French
mathematician and scholar, was a significant (but mostly overlooked and
underappreciated) figure in the 14th century. He devised a rectangular coordinate
system decades before his countryman René Descartes popularized it, as well as the
first time-speed-distance graph. He was also the first to employ fractional exponents,
and he worked on infinite series, proving that the harmonic series 11 + 12 + 13 + 14 +
15... is a divergent infinite series, as a result of his musicology research. 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. 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. This contribution are being used in today’s generation.

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Criteria: Points:
Content: your ability cogent, persuasive and relevant ideas and 10
arguments through sound reasoning and supporting examples
Organization: your ability to present your ideas in an organized and 5
cohesive fashion
Language: your control of the English language-specifically your 5
word choice and sentence structure
Grammar: your facility with the conventions of standard written 5
English( grammar and punctuation)
Total 25
End of thirteenth week
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WEEK 14
RENAISSANCE PERIOD
16th Century Mathematics
The cultural, intellectual

and artistic movement of the
Renaissance, which saw a
resurgence of learning based on
classical sources, began in Italy
around the 14th Century, and
gradually spread across most of
Europe over the next two

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centuries. Science and art were still very much interconnected and intermingled at this time, as
exemplified by the work of artist/scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, and it is no surprise that,
just as in art, revolutionary work in the fields of philosophy and science was soon taking place.
The Supermagic Square

It is a tribute to the respect in which mathematics was held in Renaissance Europe that the
famed German artist Albrecht Dürer included an order-4 magic square in his engraving
“Melencolia I“. In fact, it is a so-called “super magic square” with many more lines of addition
symmetry than a regular 4 x 4 magic square (see image at right). The year of the work, 1514,
is shown in the two bottom central squares.
An important figure in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries is an Italian Franciscan friar
called Luca Pacioli, who published a book on arithmetic, geometry and book-keeping at the
end of the 15th Century which became quite popular for the mathematical puzzles it contained.
It also introduced symbols for plus and minus for the first time in a printed book (although this
is also sometimes attributed to Giel Vander Hoecke, Johannes Widmann and others), symbols
that were to become standard notation. Pacioli also investigated the Golden Ratio of 1:
1.618… (see the section on Fibonacci) in his 1509 book “The Divine Proportion”, concluding
that the number was a message from God and a source of secret knowledge about the inner
beauty of things.
During the 16th and early 17th
Century, the equals, multiplication,
division, radical (root), decimal and
inequality symbols were gradually
introduced and standardized. The
use of decimal fractions and
decimal arithmetic is usually
attributed to the Flemish
mathematician Simon Stevin the
late 16th Century, although the
decimal point notation was not
popularized until early in the 17th
Century. Stevin was ahead of his
time in enjoining that all types of
numbers, whether fractions,
negatives, real numbers or surds
(such as √2) should be treated
equally as numbers in their own
right.

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In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in particular was
famed for its intense public mathematics competitions. It was in just such a completion that the
unlikely figure of the young, self-taught Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia revealed to the world the
formula for solving first one type, and later all types, of cubic equations (equations with terms
including x3), an achievement hitherto considered impossible and which had stumped the best
mathematicians of China, India and the Islamic world.
Building on Tartaglia’s work, another young Italian, Lodovico Ferrari, soon devised a
similar method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x4) and both solutions
were published by Gerolamo Cardano. Despite a decade-long fight over the
publication, Tartaglia, Cardano and Ferrari between them demonstrated the first uses of what
are now known as complex numbers, combinations of real and imaginary numbers (although it
fell to another Bologna resident, Rafael Bombelli, to explain what imaginary numbers really
were and how they could be used). Tartaglia went on to produce other important (although
largely ignored) formulas and methods, and Cardano published perhaps the first systematic
treatment of probability.
With Hindu-Arabic numerals, standardized notation and the new language of algebra at
their disposal, the stage was set for the European mathematical revolution of the 17th
Century.
17th Century Mathematics

In the wake of the
Renaissance, the 17th
Century saw an unprecedented
explosion of mathematical and
scientific ideas across Europe, a
period sometimes called the Age
of Reason. Hard on the heels of
the “Copernican Revolution” of
Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th
Century, scientists like Galileo
Galilei, Tycho Brahe and
Johannes Kepler were making
equally revolutionary discoveries
in the exploration of the Solar
system, leading to Kepler’s
formulation of mathematical laws

Page 8 of 38
of planetary motion.
The invention of the logarithm in the early 17th Century by John Napier (and later
improved by Napier and Henry Briggs) contributed to the advance of science, astronomy and
mathematics by making some difficult calculations relatively easy. It was one of the most
significant mathematical developments of the age, and 17th Century physicists like Kepler
and Newton could never have performed the complex calculatons needed for their innovations
without it. The French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace remarked, almost
two centuries later, that Napier, by halving the labours of astronomers, had doubled their
lifetimes.
The logarithm of a number is the exponent when that number is expressed as a power of
10 (or any other base). It is effectively the inverse of exponentiation. For example, the base 10
logarithm of 100 (usually written log 10 100 or lg 100 or just log 100) is 2, because 10 2 = 100.
The value of logarithms arises from the fact that multiplication of two or more numbers is
equivalent to adding their logarithms, a much simpler operation. In the same way, division
involves the subtraction of logarithms, squaring is as simple as multiplying the logarithm by two
(or by three for cubing, etc), square roots requires dividing the logarithm by 2 (or by 3 for cube
roots, etc).
Although base 10 is the most popular base, another common base for logarithms is the
number e which has a value of 2.7182818… and which has special properties which make it
very useful for logarithmic calculations. These are known as natural logarithms, and are written
loge or ln. Briggs produced extensive lookup tables of common (base 10) logarithms, and by
1622 William Oughted had produced a logarithmic slide rule, an instrument which became
indispensible in technological innovation for the next 300 years.
Napier also improved Simon Stevin’s decimal notation and popularized the use of the
decimal point, and made lattice multiplication (originally developed by the Persian
mathematician Al-Khwarizmi and introduced into Europe by Fibonacci) more convenient with
the introduction of “Napier’s Bones”, a multiplication tool using a set of numbered rods.
Although not principally a
mathematician, the role of the
Frenchman Marin Mersenne as a
sort of clearing house and go-
between for mathematical thought
in France during this period was
crucial. Mersenne is largely
remembered in mathematics today
in the term Mersenne primes –
prime numbers that are one less
than a power of 2, e.g. 3 (2 2-1), 7

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(23-1), 31 (25-1), 127 (27-1), 8191 (213-1), etc. In modern times, the largest known prime
number has almost always been a Mersenne prime, but in actual fact, Mersenne’s real
connection with the numbers was only to compile a none-too-accurate list of the smaller ones
(when Edouard Lucas devised a method of checking them in the 19th Century, he pointed out
that Mersenne had incorrectly included 267-1 and left out 261-1, 289-1 and 2107-1 from his list).
The Frenchman René Descartes is sometimes considered the first of the modern school
of mathematics. His development of analytic geometry and Cartesian coordinates in the mid-
17th Century soon allowed the orbits of the planets to be plotted on a graph, as well as laying
the foundations for the later development of calculus (and much later multi-dimensional
geometry). Descartes is also credited with the first use of superscripts for powers or
exponents.
Two other great French mathematicians were close contemporaries of Descartes: Pierre
de Fermat and Blaise Pascal. Fermat formulated several theorems which greatly extended
our knowlege of number theory, as well as contributing some early work on infinitesimal
calculus. Pascal is most famous for Pascal’s Triangle of binomial coefficients, although similar
figures had actually been produced by Chinese and Persian mathematicians long before him.
It was an ongoing exchange of letters between Fermat and Pascal that led to the
development of the concept of expected values and the field of probability theory. The first
published work on probability theory, however, and the first to outline the concept of
mathematical expectation, was by the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens in 1657, although it was
largely based on the ideas in the letters of the two Frenchmen.
The French mathematician
and engineer Girard Desargues is
considered one of the founders of
the field of projective geometry,
later developed further by Jean
Victor Poncelet and Gaspard
Monge. Projective geometry
considers what happens to
shapes when they are projected
on to a non-parallel plane. For
example, a circle may be
projected into an ellipse or a
hyperbola, and so these curves
may all be regarded as equivalent
in projective geometry. In particular, Desargues developed the pivotal concept of the “point at
infinity” where parallels actually meet. His perspective theorem states that, when two triangles
are in perspective, their corresponding sides meet at points on the same collinear line.

Page 10 of 38
By “standing on the shoulders of giants”, the Englishman Sir Isaac Newton was able to
pin down the laws of physics in an unprecedented way, and he effectively laid the groundwork
for all of classical mechanics, almost single-handedly. But his contribution to mathematics
should never be underestimated, and nowadays he is often considered, along
with Archimedes and Gauss, as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
Newton and, independently, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried
Leibniz, completely revolutionized mathematics (not to mention physics, engineering,
economics and science in general) by the development of infinitesimal calculus, with its two
main operations, differentiation and integration. Newton probably developed his work
before Leibniz, but Leibniz published his first, leading to an extended and rancorous dispute.
Whatever the truth behind the various claims, though, it is Leibniz’s calculus notation that is
the one still in use today, and calculus of some sort is used extensively in everything from
engineering to economics to medicine to astronomy.
Both Newton and Leibniz also contributed greatly in other areas of mathematics,
including Newton’s contributions to a generalized binomial theorem, the theory of finite
differences and the use of infinite power series, and Leibniz’s development of a mechanical
forerunner to the computer and the use of matrices to solve linear equations.
However, credit should also be given to some earlier 17th Century mathematicians whose
work partially anticipated, and to some extent paved the way for, the development of
infinitesimal calculus. As early as the 1630s, the Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri
developed a geometrical approach to calculus known as Cavalieri’s principle, or the “method of
indivisibles”. The Englishman John Wallis, who systematized and extended the methods of
analysis of Descartes and Cavalieri, also made significant contributions towards the
development of calculus, as well as originating the idea of the number line, introducing the
symbol ∞ for infinity and the term “continued fraction”, and extending the standard notation for
powers to include negative integers and rational numbers. Newton‘s teacher Isaac Barrow is
usually credited with the discovery (or at least the first rigorous statement of) the fundamental
theorem of calculus, which essentially showed that integration and differentiation are inverse
operations, and he also made complete translations of Euclid into Latin and English.
ACTIVITY #14
TASKS:
1. What was the role of mathematics during Renaissance period?
> One way mathematics was used during the Renaissance was in the creation and
refinement of linear perspective. It was during this period that artists and mathematicians

Page 11 of 38
were able to determine the mathematical formula that explains how linear perspective
works. For example, Science and art were still very much interconnected and intermingled
at this time, as exemplified by the work of artist/scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, also
the invention of the logarithm in the early 17th Century by John Napier (and later
improved by Napier and Henry Briggs) contributed to the advance of science, astronomy
and mathematics by making some difficult calculations relatively easy
2. Why was mathematics important in the Renaissance?
>The Renaissance was a period of immense transformations within Europe, not the least of
which involved a major shift in European educational ideas. During this period, a new way
of thinking came to the fore proposing a different form of training, one which would provide
the student with skills for life and not just those which were required by their occupation.
These views were championed by Humanists who established schools and institutions
which implemented these ideas. The study of Mathematics in particular was disputed by
many, because of its strong association with trade and commerce. Merchants and master
craftsmen in many areas in Europe were not given an identical level of respect or
deference as they commanded in Germany.
3. How was mathematics used in the Renaissance?
The renaissance of astrology also served the same function. The commercial revolution,
the introduction of banking, and the introduction of double entry bookkeeping all drove the
introduction and development of the Hindu-Arabic number system and algebra, which in
turn would lead to the development of analytical mathematics in the seventeenth century.
The development of astro-medicine or astromathematics led to a change in the status of
mathematic on the universities and the demand for commercial arithmetic led to the
establishment of the abbacus or reckoning schools. The Renaissance artist-engineers with
their development of linear perspective and their cult of machine design, together with the
new developments in architecture were all driving forces in the development of geometry.
All of these developments both separately and together led to a major increase in the
status of the mathematical sciences and their dissemination throughout Europe.
Criteria: Points:
cohesive fashion
Total 25

Page 12 of 38
End of fourteenth week
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WEEK 15
MATHEMATICS DURING SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Most of the late 17th

Century and a good part of the
early 18th were taken up by the
work of disciples
of Newton and Leibniz, who
applied their ideas on calculus to
solving a variety of problems in
physics, astronomy and
engineering.
The period was dominated,
though, by one family,
the Bernoulli’s of Basel in
Switzerland, which boasted two or
three generations of exceptional
mathematicians, particularly the
brothers, Jacob and Johann. They were largely responsible for further developing Leibniz’s
infinitesimal calculus – paricularly through the generalization and extension of calculus known
as the “calculus of variations” – as well as Pascal and Fermat’s probability and number theory.
The period was dominated, though, by one family, the Bernoulli’s of Basel in
Switzerland, which boasted two or three generations of exceptional mathematicians,
particularly the brothers, Jacob and Johann. They were largely responsible for further
developing Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus – paricularly through the generalization and
extension of calculus known as the “calculus of variations” – as well as Pascal and Fermat’s
probability and number theory.
Basel was also the home town of the greatest of the 18th Century
mathematicians, Leonhard Euler, although, partly due to the difficulties in getting on in a city

Page 13 of 38
dominated by the Bernoulli family, Euler spent most of his time abroad, in Germany and St.
Petersburg, Russia. He excelled in all aspects of mathematics, from geometry to calculus to
trigonometry to algebra to number theory, and was able to find unexpected links between the
different fields. He proved numerous theorems, pioneered new methods, standardized
mathematical notation and wrote many influential textbooks throughout his long academic life.
In a letter to Euler in 1742, the German mathematician Christian Goldbach proposed the
Goldbach Conjecture, which states that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as
the sum of two primes (e.g. 4 = 2 + 2; 8 = 3 + 5; 14 = 3 + 11 = 7 + 7; etc) or, in another
equivalent version, every integer greater than 5 can be expressed as the sum of three primes.
Yet another version is the so-called “weak” Goldbach Conjecture, that all odd numbers greater
than 7 are the sum of three odd primes. They remain among the oldest unsolved problems in
number theory (and in all of mathematics), although the weak form of the conjecture appears
to be closer to resolution than the strong one. Goldbach also proved other theorems in number
theory such as the Goldbach-Euler Theorem on perfect powers.
Despite Euler’s and the Bernoullis’ dominance of 18th Century mathematics, many of the
other important mathematicians were from France. In the early part of the century, Abraham de
Moivre is perhaps best known for de Moivre’s formula, (cosx + isinx)n = cos(nx) + isin(nx),
which links complex numbers and trigonometry. But he also generalized Newton’s famous
binomial theorem into the multinomial theorem, pioneered the development of analytic
geometry, and his work on the normal distribution (he gave the first statement of the formula
for the normal distribution curve) and probability theory were of great importance.
France became even more prominent towards the end of the century, and a handful of
late 18th Century French mathematicians in particular deserve mention at this point,
beginning with “the three L’s”.
Joseph Louis Lagrange collaborated with Euler in an important joint work on the calculus
of variation, but he also contributed to differential equations and number theory, and he is
usually credited with originating the theory of groups, which would become so important
in 19th and 20th Century mathematics. His name is given an early theorem in group theory,
which states that the number of elements of every sub-group of a finite group divides evenly
into the number of elements of the original finite group.
Lagrange’s Mean Value Theorem

Lagrange is also credited with
the four-square theorem, that
any natural number can be
represented as the sum of four
squares (e.g. 3 = 12 + 12 + 12 + 02;
31 = 52 + 22 + 12 + 12; 310 = 172 +

Page 14 of 38
42 + 22 + 12; etc), as well as another theorem, confusingly also known as Lagrange’s
Theorem or Lagrange’s Mean Value Theorem, which states that, given a section of a
smooth continuous (differentiable) curve, there is at least one point on that section at which the
derivative (or slope) of the curve is equal (or parallel) to the average (or mean) derivative of the
section. Lagrange’s 1788 treatise on analytical mechanics offered the most comprehensive
treatment of classical mechanics since Newton, and formed a basis for the development of
mathematical physics in the 19th Century.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, sometimes referred to as “the French Newton”, was an important

mathematician and astronomer, whose monumental work “Celestial Mechanics” translated the
geometric study of classical mechanics to one based on calculus, opening up a much broader
range of problems. Although his early work was mainly on differential equations and finite
differences, he was already starting to think about the mathematical and philosophical
concepts of probability and statistics in the 1770s, and he developed his own version of the so-
called Bayesian interpretation of probability independently of Thomas Bayes. Laplace is well
known for his belief in complete scientific determinism, and he maintained that there should be
a set of scientific laws that would allow us – at least in principle – to predict everything about
the universe and how it works.
The First Six Legendre Polynomials
Adrien-Marie Legendre also
made important contributions to
statistics, number theory, abstract
algebra and mathematical analysis
in the late 18th and early 19th
Centuries, athough much of his
work (such as the least squares
method for curve-fitting and linear
regression, the quadratic
reciprocity law, the prime number
theorem and his work on elliptic
functions) was only brought to
perfection – or at least to general
notice – by others, particularly Gauss. His “Elements of Geometry”, a re-working of Euclid’s
book, became the leading geometry textbook for almost 100 years, and his extremely accurate
measurement of the terrestrial meridian inspired the creation, and almost universal adoption, of
the metric system of measures and weights.
Yet another Frenchman, Gaspard Monge was the inventor of descriptive geometry, a
clever method of representing three-dimensional objects by projections on the two-dimensional

Page 15 of 38
plane using a specific set of procedures, a technique which would later become important in
the fields of engineering, architecture and design. His orthographic projection became the
graphical method used in almost all modern mechanical drawing.
After many centuries of increasingly accurate approximations, Johann Lambert, a Swiss
mathematician and prominent astronomer, finally provided a rigorous proof in 1761 that π is
irrational, i.e. it cannot be expressed as a simple fraction using integers only or as a
terminating or repeating decimal. This definitively proved that it would never be possible to
calculate it exactly, although the obsession with obtaining more and more accurate
approximations continues to this day. (Over a hundred years later, in 1882, Ferdinand von
Lindemann would prove that π is also transcendental, i.e. it cannot be the root of any
polynomial equation with rational coefficients). Lambert was also the first to introduce
hyperbolic functions into trigonometry and made some prescient conjectures regarding non-
Euclidean space and the properties of hyperbolic triangles.
ACTIVITY #15
(To be submitted on Tuesday, January 19, 2021)
Discussion Points and Exercise Questions
Direction: Read and understand this module. Provide what is being asked. Write your answer
in a long bond paper (Hand written) and attach it to the last page of this module.
TASKS:
1. What role did mathematics play in the Scientific Revolution?

Mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry all benefited from the
scientific revolution, which emphasized systematic experiments as the most
effective research methods. These advances have changed the way society views
nature. New technologies enable new experiments and access to more or
completely new data. Recall how advances in optics have made it possible to
discover planets and microbes. Think about how the electron microscope has
revealed a whole new dimension to the world.
Science is not the same as technology (many people can be confused), but they
are interrelated, but each brings benefits and influences the progress of the
other.
Therefore, the better the tool, the better you can understand things. In short, the
tools are great.
2. How did the mathematics during Scientific Revolution change the world?
Advances in mathematics have enabled the proof of abstract hypotheses,
provided more logical techniques for working with Aristotle's systems, and were

Page 16 of 38
important conditions for advances in physics and astronomy during the Scientific
Revolution. Thus, this doesn’t only contribute to the development of Science but
also to the people around the world and to its next generation.
Criteria: Points:
cohesive fashion
Total 25
End of fifteenth week

---------------------------------------------Nothing Follows--------------------------------------
WEEK 16
CONTINUATION OF MATHEMATICS DURING SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
The scientific revolution was the emergence of modern science during the early modern
period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human
anatomy), and chemistry transformed societal views about nature. The scientific revolution
began in Europe toward the end of the Renaissance period, and continued through the late
18th century, influencing the intellectual social movement known as the Enlightenment. While
its dates are disputed, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus ‘s De revolutionibus
orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) is often cited as marking the
beginning of the scientific revolution

Page 17 of 38
The scientific revolution was built upon the foundation of ancient Greek learning and
science in the Middle Ages, as it had been elaborated and further developed by
Roman/Byzantine science and medieval Islamic science. The Aristotelian tradition was still an
important intellectual framework in the 17th century, although by that time natural
philosophers had moved away from much of it. Key scientific ideas dating back to classical
antiquity had changed drastically over the years, and in many cases been discredited. The
ideas that remained (for example, Aristotle‘s cosmology, which placed the Earth at the center
of a spherical hierarchic cosmos, or the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion) were
transformed fundamentally during the scientific revolution.
The change to the medieval idea of science occurred for four reasons:
1. Seventeenth century scientists and philosophers were able to collaborate with members
of the mathematical and astronomical communities to effect advances in all fields.
2. Scientists realized the inadequacy of medieval experimental methods for their work and
so felt the need to devise new methods (some of which we use today).
3. Academics had access to a legacy of European, Greek, and Middle Eastern scientific
philosophy that they could use as a starting point (either by disproving or building on the
theorems).
4. Institutions (for example, the British Royal Society) helped validate science as a field by
providing an outlet for the publication of scientists’ work.
New Methods
Under the scientific method that was defined and applied in the 17th century, natural and
artificial circumstances were abandoned, and a research tradition of systematic
experimentation was slowly accepted throughout the scientific community. The philosophy of
using an inductive approach to nature (to abandon assumption and to attempt to simply
observe with an open mind) was in strict contrast with the earlier, Aristotelian approach of
deduction, by which analysis of known facts produced further understanding. In practice, many
scientists and philosophers believed that a healthy mix of both was needed—the willingness to
both question assumptions, and to interpret observations assumed to have some degree of
validity.
During the scientific revolution, changing perceptions about the role of the scientist in respect
to nature, the value of evidence, experimental or observed, led towards a scientific
methodology in which empiricism played a large, but not absolute, role. The term British
empiricism came into use to describe philosophical differences perceived between two of its
founders—Francis Bacon, described as empiricist, and René Descartes, who was described
as a rationalist. Bacon’s works established and popularized inductive methodologies for

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scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or sometimes simply the scientific method.
His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in
the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions
of proper methodology today. Correspondingly, Descartes distinguished between the
knowledge that could be attained by reason alone (rationalist approach), as, for example, in
mathematics, and the knowledge that required experience of the world, as in physics.
Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley, and David Hume were the primary exponents of
empiricism, and developed a sophisticated empirical tradition as the basis of human
knowledge. The recognized founder of the approach was John Locke, who proposed in An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that the only true knowledge that could be
accessible to the human mind was that which was based on experience.
New Ideas
Many new ideas contributed to what is called the scientific revolution. Some of them
were revolutions in their own fields. These include:
 The heliocentric model that involved the radical displacement of the earth to an orbit
around the sun (as opposed to being seen as the center of the universe). Copernicus’
1543 work on the heliocentric model of the solar system tried to demonstrate that the sun
was the center of the universe. The discoveries of Johannes Kepler and Galileo gave the
theory credibility and the work culminated in Isaac Newton’s Principia, which formulated
the laws of motion and universal gravitation that dominated scientists’ view of the
physical universe for the next three centuries.
 Studying human anatomy based upon the dissection of human corpses, rather than the
animal dissections, as practiced for centuries.
 Discovering and studying magnetism and electricity, and thus, electric properties of
various materials.
 Modernization of disciplines (making them more as what they are today), including
dentistry, physiology, chemistry, or optics.
 Invention of tools that deepened the understating of sciences, including mechanical
calculator,
steam digester (the forerunner of the steam engine), refracting and reflecting telescopes,
vacuum pump, or mercury barometer.
NOTABLE PERSONS DURING SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

 Francis Bacon
Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the great philosophers of the Scientific Revolution. His
thoughts on logic and ethics in science and his ideas on the cooperation and interaction of the
various fields of science, presented in his work Novum Organum, have remained influential in
the scientific world to this day.
 Giovanni Alfonso Borelli
Borelli (1608-1679) was the foremost thinker of the era on human mechanics. His 1680
work, On the Motion of Animals, is widely recognized as the greatest early triumph of the
application of mechanics to the human organisms.

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 Robert Boyle
Boyle (1627-1691), a successful physicist at Oxford college, worked with his colleague Robert
Hooke to discern the properties of the air, experimenting with air pressure and the composition
of the atmosphere. Boyle proved that only a part of the air is used in respiration and
combustion, and is thus credited with the discovery of oxygen. Boyle's further work touched on
the beginnings of the study of matter on the atomic scale.
 Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was a great astronomical observer, and made accurate and long-
term records of his observations, from which he derived his view of the structure of the solar
system, in which the moon and sun orbited the Earth and the remaining planets orbited the
sun. While incorrect, his scheme was as viable by the knowledge of the time as was that of
Nicolas Copernicus.
 Otto Brunfels
A German, in 1530 Brunfels (1488-1534) was the first to produce a major work on plants.
However, he fell victim to a blunder made by many botanists of the time. In reverence for the
ancients, whose botanical studies were widely revered, in his study he attempted to compare
his findings to those of the Greeks and Romans. The differences in plant life produced by the
variation in geography meant that comparison was futile, and confusion resulted in the field of
botany, clouding the work of many of Brunfels' immediate followers.
 Giordano Bruno
A renegade Italian monk, Bruno (1548-1600) published three works--The Ash-Wednesday
Supper,On Cause, Principle, and Unity, and On the Infinite Universe and its Worlds--in which
he laid out his philosophy that the universe was of infinite size, and that the Earth, sun, and
planets were all moving constantly within it, and were by no means located at its center.
 Nicolas Copernicus
Copernicus (1473-1543) was an avid student of astronomy, and in 1543 published De
Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. In this treatise, he presented the heliocentric theory, which
rested on the revolutionary notion that the Earth orbited the sun.
 Rene Descartes
Descartes (1596-1650) was one of the greatest minds of the Scientific Revolution. The
inventor of deductive reasoning, Descartes was a failure as a practical scientist, but a success
as a mathematician, uniting number and form in his work Geometry, which described how the
motion of a point could be mapped graphically by comparing its position to planes of reference.
 Leonard Fuchs

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A Botanist of the sixteenth century, Fuchs (1501-1566) produced a guide to collecting medical
plants that is considered a landmark in the history of natural observation. His woodcut prints
are the most beautiful and accurate of the period.
 Galen
An ancient Greek physician, Galen's (129-199) work was the centerpiece of traditional biology
and anatomy that had lasted through the Middle Ages.
 Galileo Galilei
Galileo (1564-1642) was the most successful scientist of the Scientific Revolution, save only
Isaac Newton. He studied physics, specifically the laws of gravity and motion, and invented the
telescope and microscope. Galileo eventually combined his laws of physics with the
observations he made with his telescope to defend the heliocentric Copernican view of the
universe and refute the Aristotelian system in his 1630 masterwork, Dialogue on the Two Chief
Systems of the World. Upon its publication, he was censored by the Catholic Church and
sentenced to house arrest in 1633, where he remained until his death in 1642. Read the
SparkNote on Galileo.
 Samuel Hartlib
Hartlib (1600-1662), a London scientist and socialite, first conceived of the creation of the
Royal Society of London, and was instrumental in its eventual founding in 1662.
 William Harvey
Through dissection, Harvey (1578-1657) was the first to demonstrate that the circulation of
blood through the human body is continuous, rather than consisting of different types
circulating through the veins and arteries, as had been previously assumed by the ancient
Greek physician, Galen.
 Johannes Kepler
Kepler (1571-1630) studied the orbits of the planets and sought to discern some grand scheme
that defined the structure of the universe according to simple geometry. Though he was unable
to do accomplish his goal, he did come up with the laws of planetary motion, which explained
the orbital properties of planets, and factored extensively into Isaac Newton's later work. Read
the SparkNotes on Newton and Kepler.
 Edme Mariotte
A botanist of the seventeenth century, Edme Mariotte (1620-1684) sought to explain sap
pressure in plants by describing a mechanism by which plants permit the entrance but not the
exit of liquid.
 Marcello Malpighi
A well-known microscopist, Malpighi (1628-1694) studied insects in depth and developed a
theory of plant circulation which, though flawed, inspired interest in the field. Malpighi's studies

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were immortalized when his name was given to the main excretory organ of arthropods, the
malpighian tubules.
 John Napier
In 1594, John Napier(1550-1617) invented the mathematical tool of logarithms. He spent the
next 20 years of his life developing his theory and computing an extensive table of logarithms
to aid in calculation. In 1614, he published Description of the Marvelous Canon of
Logarithms, which contained the fruits of these labors.
 Isaac Newton
Perhaps the most influential scientist of all time, Newton (1642-1727) took the current theories
on astronomy a step further and formulated an accurate comprehensive model of the workings
of the universe based on the law of universal gravitation. Newton explained his theories in the
1687 revolutionary work Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica, often called simply
the Principia. This work also went a long way toward developing calculus. Read the SparkNote
on Newton.
 Ptolemy
An ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician, Ptolemy's geocentric views on the structure
of the universe dominated astronomy until the Scientific Revolution.
 Santorio Santorio
Santorio (1561-1636) was one of the first to apply the evolving physical philosophy of the
Scientific Revolution to animal biology. His experiments laid the groundwork for the study of
metabolism and the physical and chemical processes of the human body.
 Simon Stevin
Stevin (1548-1620) worked with geometry during the late sixteenth century, applying it to the
physics of incline planes and the hydrostatic surface tension of water. Additionally, he
introduced the decimal system of representing fractions, an advance which greatly eased the
task of calculation.
 Franciscus Sylvius
One of the earliest chemical biologists, Sylvius (1614-1672) introduced the idea of chemical
affinity to explain the human body's use of salts. He and his followers contributed greatly to the
study of digestion and body fluids.
 Evangelista Torricelli
Torricelli (1608-1647) invented the barometer, to measure air pressure, in 1643. This was a
large step in the understanding of the properties of air, and the basic structure of the
barometer remains the same today. A unit of pressure, called a Torr, is named after him.
 Jan Baptist van Helmont
Van Helmont (1580-1644) was an alchemist who largely abided by the accepted truths of the
Middle Ages, but in many ways broke from the past and moved forward. He experimented on
the role of water in the growth of plants, claiming that plants drew all of their substance from

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water. He also demonstrated that gases, though they commonly appeared quite similar, could
be quite different in character. In fact, van Helmont invented the word "gas." Read the
SparkNote on Gases.
 Andreas Vesalius
As a student and professor in Belgium and Paris, Vesalius (1514-1564) was educated in the
anatomical works and theories of the ancient Greek physician Galen, whose views on anatomy
had long been the standard in Europe. Vesalius questioned Galen's authority, and
published On the Fabric of the Human Body in 1543. It is considered the first great modern
work of science, and the foundation of modern biology.
 Francois Viete
Viete (1540-1603) was one of the first to use letters to represent unknown numbers. In 1591,
he invented analytical trigonometry using this algebraic method.
 Otto von Guericke
In 1656, Otto von Guericke (1602-1686) invented the air pump, and did the first experiments
with vacuums. In the process he demonstrated many of the properties of gases, such as the
(until then) disputed claim that they did, in fact, have weight.
 John Wallis
Wallis' work, Arithmetica Infinitum, published in 1655, set the stage for the invention and
development of differential calculus: this work went on to be one of Isaac Newton's major
influences. Wallis (1616-1703) was the first mathematician to apply mathematics to the
operation of the tides, and also invented the symbol used to denote infinity.
ACTIVITY # 16
(To be submitted on Tuesday January 26, 2021)
TASK/S
Choose five notable persons who greatly contributed during Scientific Revolution. Explain why
you chose each notable person.
Isaac Newton - He is credited with inventing calculus and establishing a clear understanding of optics.
But it was his study on forces, notably the establishment of a universal rule of gravity, that he was most
famous for.


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Johannes Kepler was a leading astronomer of the Scientific Revolution known for formulating the Laws
of Planetary Motion. An astronomer, of course, is a person who studies the Sun, stars, planets and
other aspects of space. Kepler was German and lived between 1571 and 1630. Like many scientists of
this time, Kepler also taught mathematics. He served as an assistant to another famous astronomer
named Tycho Brahe, and he even provided his expertise to Emperor Rudolf II. Kepler's ideas about
astronomy proved to be very influential. His ideas helped influence Isaac Newton and many other
leaders of the Scientific Revolution.
Rene Descartes - He is often regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. He was the founder of the
philosophical movement known as rationalism, which is a way of viewing the universe based on the use
of reason to gain information.

Galileo Galilei - He developed the telescope, with which he discovered Jupiter's four largest moons,
Venus' phases, and Saturn's rings, as well as making comprehensive investigations of sunspots.
Tycho Brahe - For centuries, astronomers relied on Brahe's comprehensive mathematical tables. He
also determined the positions of 1,000 fixed stars correctly. He released his book Introduction to the
New Astronomy in 1588, which featured comet observations and his world system.
Criteria: Points:
Content: your ability cogent, persuasive and relevant ideas and arguments 10
through sound reasoning and supporting examples
Organization: your ability to present your ideas in an organized and cohesive 5

fashion
Language: your control of the English language-specifically your word choice and 5
sentence structure
Grammar: your facility with the conventions of standard written English( grammar 5
and punctuation)
Total 25
End of sixteenth week

---------------------------------------------Nothing Follows--------------------------------------

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WEEK 17
MODERN AND FUTURE MATHEMATICS
The 19th Century saw an

unprecedented increase in the Approximation of a periodic function by the Fourier
breadth and complexity of Series
mathematical concepts. Both
France and Germany were caught up in the age of revolution which swept Europe in the late
18th Century, but the two countries treated mathematics quite differently.
After the French Revolution, Napoleon emphasized the practical usefulness of
mathematics and his reforms and military ambitions gave French mathematics a big boost, as
exemplified by “the three L’s”, Lagrange, Laplace and Legendre (see the section on 18th
Century Mathematics), Fourier and Galois.
Joseph Fourier’s study, at the beginning of the 19th Century, of infinite sums in which the
terms are trigonometric functions were another important advance in mathematical analysis.
Periodic functions that can be expressed as the sum of an infinite series of sines and cosines
are known today as Fourier Series, and they are still powerful tools in pure and applied
mathematics. Fourier (following Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange and others) also contributed towards
defining exactly what is meant by a function, although the definition that is found in texts today
– defining it in terms of a correspondence between elements of the domain and the range – is
usually attributed to the 19th Century German mathematician Peter Dirichlet.
In 1806, Jean-Robert Argand published his paper on how complex numbers (of the form
a + bi, where i is √-1) could be represented on geometric diagrams and manipulated using
trigonometry and vectors. Even though the Dane Caspar Wessel had produced a very similar
paper at the end of the 18th Century, and even though it was Gauss who popularized the
practice, they are still known today as Argand Diagrams.
The Frenchman Évariste Galois proved in the late 1820s that there is no general
algebraic method for solving polynomial equations of any degree greater than four, going
further than the Norwegian Niels Henrik Abel who had, just a few years earlier, shown the
impossibility of solving quintic equations, and breaching an impasse which had existed for
centuries. Galois‘ work also laid the groundwork for further developments such as the
beginnings of the field of abstract algebra, including areas like algebraic geometry, group

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theory, rings, fields, modules, vector spaces and non-commutative algebra.
Germany, on the other hand, under the influence of the great educationalist Wilhelm von
Humboldt, took a rather different approach, supporting pure mathematics for its own sake,
detached from the demands of the state and military. It was in this environment that the young
German prodigy Carl Friedrich Gauss, sometimes called the “Prince of Mathematics”,
received his education at the prestigious University of Göttingen. Some of Gauss’ ideas were a
hundred years ahead of their time, and touched on many different parts of the mathematical
world, including geometry, number theory, calculus, algebra and probability. He is widely
regarded as one of the three
greatest mathematicians of all
times, along with Archimedes
and Newton.
Later in life, Gauss also claimed
to have investigated a kind of
non-Euclidean geometry using
curved space but, unwilling to Euclidean, hyperbolic and elliptic geometry
court controversy, he decided

not to pursue or publish any of these avant-garde ideas. This left the field open for János
Bolyai and Nikolai Lobachevsky (respectively, a Hungarian and a Russian) who both
independently explored the potential of hyperbolic geometry and curved spaces.
The German Bernhard Riemann worked on a different kind of non-Euclidean geometry
called elliptic geometry, as well as on a generalized theory of all the different types of
geometry. Riemann, however, soon took this even further, breaking away completely from all
the limitations of 2 and 3 dimensional geometry, whether flat or curved, and began to think in
higher dimensions. His exploration of the zeta function in multi-dimensional complex numbers
revealed an unexpected link with the distribution of prime numbers, and his famous Riemann
Hypothesis, still unproven after 150 years, remains one of the world’s great unsolved
mathematical mysteries and the testing ground for new generations of mathematicians.
British mathematics also saw something of a resurgence in the early and mid-19th
century. Although the roots of the computer go back to the geared calculators of Pascal and
Leibniz in the 17th Century, it was Charles Babbage in 19th Century England who designed a
machine that could automatically perform computations based on a program of instructions
stored on cards or tape. His large “difference engine” of 1823 was able to calculate
logarithms and trigonometric functions, and was the true forerunner of the modern electronic
computer. Although never actually built in his lifetime, a machine was built almost 200 years
later to his specifications and worked perfectly. He also designed a much more sophisticated
machine he called the “analytic engine“, complete with punched cards, printer and
computational abilities commensurate with modern computers.

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Another 19th Century Englishman, George Peacock, is usually credited with the
invention of symbolic algebra, and the extension of the scope of algebra beyond the ordinary
systems of numbers. This recognition of the possible existence of non-arithmetical algebras
was an important stepping stone toward future developments in abstract algebra.
In the mid-19th Century, the British mathematician George Boole devised an algebra
(now called Boolean algebra or Boolean logic), in which the only operators were AND, OR and
NOT, and which could be applied to the solution of logical problems and mathematical
functions. He also described a kind of binary system which used just two objects, “on” and “off”
(or “true” and “false”, 0 and 1, etc), in which, famously, 1 + 1 = 1. Boolean algebra was the
starting point of modern mathematical logic and ultimately led to the development of computer
science.
The concept of number and algebra was further extended by the Irish mathematician
William Hamilton, whose 1843 theory of quaternions (a 4-dimensional number system, where
a quantity representing a 3-
dimensional rotation can be Hamilton’s quaternion
described by just an angle and a
vector). Quaternions, and its later generalization by Hermann Grassmann, provided the first
example of a non-commutative algebra (i.e. one in which a x b does not always equal b x a),
and showed that several different consistent algebras may be derived by choosing different
sets of axioms.
The Englishman Arthur Cayley extended Hamilton’s quaternions and developed the
octonions. But Cayley was one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, and was a
pioneer of modern group theory, matrix algebra, the theory of higher singularities, and higher
dimensional geometry (anticipating the later ideas of Klein), as well as the theory of invariants.
Throughout the 19th Century, mathematics in general became ever more complex and
abstract. But it also saw a re-visiting of some older methods and an emphasis on mathematical
rigour. In the first decades of the century, the Bohemian priest Bernhard Bolzano was one of
the earliest mathematicians to begin instilling rigour into mathematical analysis, as well as
giving the first purely analytic proof of both the fundamental theorem of algebra and the
intermediate value theorem, and early consideration of sets (collections of objects defined by a
common property, such as “all the numbers greater than 7” or “all right triangles“, etc).
Along with Riemann and, particularly, the Frenchman Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Weierstrass
completely reformulated calculus in an even more rigorous fashion, leading to the development
of mathematical analysis, a branch of pure mathematics largely concerned with the notion of
limits (whether it be the limit of a sequence or the limit of a function) and with the theories of
differentiation, integration, infinite series and analytic functions. In 1845, Cauchy also proved
Cauchy’s theorem, a fundamental theorem of group theory, which he discovered while
examining permutation groups. Carl Jacobi also made important contributions to analysis,

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determinants and matrices, and
especially his theory of periodic
functions and elliptic functions and
their relation to the elliptic theta
function.
August Ferdinand Möbius is
best known for his 1858 discovery
of the Möbius strip, a non-
orientable two-dimensional surface
which has only one side when
embedded in three-dimensional
Euclidean space (actually a
German, Johann Benedict Listing,
devised the same object just a
couple of months before Möbius, Non-orientable surfaces with no identifiable “inner”
but it has come to hold Möbius’ and “outer” sides
name). Many other concepts are

also named after him, including the Möbius configuration, Möbius transformations, the Möbius
transform of number theory, the Möbius function and the Möbius inversion formula. He also
introduced homogeneous coordinates and discussed geometric and projective
transformations.
Felix Klein also pursued more developments in non-Euclidean geometry, include the Klein
bottle, a one-sided closed surface that cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean
space, only in four or more dimensions. It can be best visualized as a cylinder looped back
through itself to join with its other end from the “inside”. Klein’s 1872 Erlangen Program,
which classified geometries by their underlying symmetry groups (or their groups of
transformations), was a hugely influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the day, and
his work was very important in the later development of group theory and function theory.
The Norwegian mathematician Marius Sophus Lie also applied algebra to the study of
geometry. He largely created the theory of continuous symmetry, and applied it to the
geometric theory of differential equations by means of continuous groups of transformations
known as Lie groups.
In the later 19th Century, Georg Cantor established the first foundations of set theory,
which enabled the rigorous treatment of the notion of infinity, and which has since become the
common language of nearly all mathematics. In the face of fierce resistance from most of his
contemporaries and his own battle against mental illness, Cantor explored new mathematical
worlds where there were many different infinities, some of which were larger than others.

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Cantor’s work on set theory
was extended by another
German, Richard Dedekind, who
defined concepts such as similar
sets and infinite sets. Dedekind
also came up with the notion,
now called a Dedekind cut which
is now a standard definition of
the real numbers. He showed Venn diagram
that any irrational number divides the rational numbers into two classes or sets, the upper
class being strictly greater than all the members of the other lower class. Thus, every location
on the number line continuum contains either a rational or an irrational number, with no empty
locations, gaps or discontinuities. In 1881, the Englishman John Venn introduced his
“Venn diagrams” which become useful and ubiquitous tools in set theory.
Building on Riemann’s deep ideas on the distribution of prime numbers, the year 1896
saw two independent proofs of
the asymptotic law of the
distribution of prime numbers
(known as the Prime Number
Theorem), one by Jacques
Hadamard and one by Charles
de la Vallée Poussin, which
showed that the number of
primes occurring up to any
number x is asymptotic to (or
tends towards) x⁄log x.
Hermann Minkowski, a
great friend of David Hilbert and
teacher of the young Albert
Minkowski space-time
Einstein, developed a branch of
number theory called the “geometry of numbers” late in the 19th Century as a geometrical
method in multi-dimensional space for solving number theory problems, involving complex
concepts such as convex sets, lattice points and vector space. Later, in 1907, it was
Minkowski who realized that the Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity could be best
understood in a four-dimensional space, often referred to as Minkowski space-time.
Gottlob Frege’s 1879 “Begriffsschrift” (roughly translated as “Concept-Script”) broke
new ground in the field of logic, including a rigorous treatment of the ideas of functions and
variables. In his attempt to show that mathematics grows out of logic, he devised techniques

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that took him far beyond the logical traditions of Aristotle (and even of George Boole). He was
the first to explicitly introduce the notion of variables in logical statements, as well as the
notions of quantifiers, universals and existentials. He extended Boole‘s “propositional logic”
into a new “predicate logic” and, in so doing, set the stage for the radical advances of
Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert in the early 20th Century.
Henri Poincaré came to prominence in the latter part of the 19th Century with at least a partial
solution to the “three body problem”, a deceptively simple problem which had stubbornly
resisted resolution since the time of Newton, over two hundred years earlier. Although his
solution actually proved to be erroneous, its implications led to the early intimations of what
would later become known as chaos theory. In between his important work in theoretical
physics, he also greatly extended the theory of mathematical topology, leaving behind a knotty
problem known as the Poincaré conjecture which remained unsolved until 2002.
Poincaré was also an engineer and a polymath, and perhaps the last of the great
mathematicians to adhere to an older conception of mathematics, which championed a faith in
human intuition over rigour and formalism. He is sometimes referred to as the “Last
Univeralist” as he was perhaps the last mathematician able to shine in almost all of the
various aspects of what had become by now a huge, encyclopedic and incredibly complex
subject. The 20th Century would belong to the specialists.
The 20th Century continued the trend of the 19th towards increasing generalization and
abstraction in mathematics, in which the notion of axioms as “self-evident truths” was largely
discarded in favour of an emphasis on such logical concepts as consistency and
completeness.
It also saw mathematics become a major profession, involving thousands of new Ph.D.s
each year and jobs in both teaching and industry, and the development of hundreds of
specialized areas and fields of study, such as group theory, knot theory, sheaf theory, topology,
graph theory, functional analysis, singularity theory, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, model
theory, category theory, game theory, complexity theory and many more.
The eccentric British mathematician G.H. Hardy and his young Indian
protégé Srinivasa Ramanujan, were just two of the great mathematicians of the early 20th
Century who applied themselves in earnest to solving problems of the previous century, such
as the Riemann hypothesis. Although they came close, they too were defeated by that most
intractable of problems, but Hardy is credited with reforming British mathematics, which had
sunk to something of a low ebb at that time, and Ramanujan proved himself to be one of the
most brilliant (if somewhat undisciplined and unstable) minds of the century.
The early 20th Century also saw the beginnings of the rise of the field of mathematical
logic, building on the earlier advances of Gottlob Frege, which came to fruition in the hands of
Giuseppe Peano, L.E.J. Brouwer, David Hilbert and, particularly, Bertrand Russell and A.N.
Whitehead, whose monumental joint work the “Principia Mathematica” was so influential in

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mathematical and philosophical
logicism.
The century began with a
historic convention at the
Sorbonne in Paris in the summer
of 1900 which is largely
remembered for a lecture by the
young German
mathematician David Hilbert in
which he set out what he saw as Part of the transcript of Hilbert’s 1900 Paris lecture,
the 23 greatest unsolved in which he set out his 23 problems
mathematical problems of the
day. These “Hilbert problems” effectively set the agenda for 20th Century mathematics, and
laid down the gauntlet for generations of mathematicians to come. Of these original 23
problems, 10 have now been solved, 7 are partially solved, and 2 (the Riemann hypothesis
and the Kronecker-Weber theorem on abelian extensions) are still open, with the remaining 4
being too loosely formulated to be stated as solved or not.
Hilbert was himself a brilliant mathematician, responsible for several theorems and some
entirely new mathematical concepts, as well as overseeing the development of what amounted
to a whole new style of abstract mathematical thinking. Hilbert‘s approach signalled the shift to
the modern axiomatic method, where axioms are not taken to be self-evident truths. He was
unfailingly optimistic about the future of mathematics, famously declaring in a 1930 radio
interview “We must know. We will know!”, and was a well-loved leader of the mathematical
community during the first part of the century. However, the Austrian Kurt Gödel was soon to
put some very severe constraints on what could and could not be solved, and turned
mathematics on its head with his famous incompleteness theorem, which proved the
unthinkable – that there could be solutions to mathematical problems which were true but
which could never be proved.
Alan Turing, perhaps best known for his war-time work in breaking the German enigma
code, spent his pre-war years trying to clarify and simplify Gödel’s rather abstract proof. His
methods led to some conclusions that were perhaps even more devastating than Gödel’s,
including the idea that there was no way of telling beforehand which problems were provable
and which unprovable. But, as a spin-off, his work also led to the development of computers
and the first considerations of such concepts as artificial intelligence.
Many of the brightest European mathematicians, including Hermann Weyl, John von
Neumann, Kurt Gödel and Albert Einstein, fled the Nazis to this safe haven.
Emmy Noether, a German Jew who was also forced out of Germany by the Nazi regime,
was considered by many (including Albert Einstein) to be the most important woman in the

Page 31 of 38
history of mathematics. Her work in the 1920s and 1930s changed the face of abstract
algebra, and she made important
contributions in the fields of
algebraic invariants, commutative
rings, number fields, non-
commutative algebra, and
hypercomplex numbers.
Noether’s theorem on the
connection between symmetry
and conservation laws was key in
the development of quantum
mechanics and other aspects of
modern physics.
John von Neumann is
considered one of the foremost
mathematicians in modern
history, another mathematical Von Neumann’s computer architecture design
child prodigy who went on to make major contributions to a vast range of fields. In addition to
his physical work in quantum theory and his role in the Manhattan Project and the
development of nuclear physics and the hydrogen bomb, he is particularly remembered as a
pioneer of game theory, and particularly for his design model for a stored-program digital
computer that uses a processing unit and a separate storage structure to hold both instructions
and data, a general architecture that most electronic computers follow even today.
Another American, Claude Shannon, has become known as the father of information
theory, and he, von Neumann and Alan Turing between them effectively kick-started the
computer and digital revolution of the 20th Century. His early work on Boolean algebra and
binary arithmetic resulted in his foundation of digital circuit design in 1937 and a more robust
exposition of communication and information theory in 1948. He also made important
contributions in cryptography, natural language processing and sampling theory.
The Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov is usually credited with laying the modern
axiomatic foundations of probability theory in the 1930s, and he established a reputation
as the world’s leading expert in this field. He also made important contributions to the fields of
topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory
and computational complexity.
André Weil was another refugee from the war in Europe, after narrowly avoiding death on
a couple of occasions. His theorems, which allowed connections to be made between number
theory, algebra, geometry and topology, are considered among the greatest achievements of
modern mathematics. He was also responsible for setting up a group of French

Page 32 of 38
mathematicians who, under the secret nom-de-plume of Nicolas Bourbaki, wrote many
influential books on the mathematics of the 20th Century.
Perhaps the greatest heir to Weil’s legacy was Alexander Grothendieck, a charismatic
and beloved figure in 20th Century French mathematics. Grothendieck was a structuralist,
interested in the hidden structures beneath all mathematics, and in the 1950s he created a
powerful new language which enabled mathematical structures to be seen in a new way, thus
allowing new solutions in number theory, geometry, even in fundamental physics. His “theory
of schemes” allowed certain of Weil‘s number theory conjectures to be solved, and his “theory
of topoi” is highly relevant to mathematical logic. In addition, he gave an algebraic proof of the
Riemann-Roch theorem, and provided an algebraic definition of the fundamental group of a
curve. Although, after the 1960s, Grothendieck all but abandoned mathematics for radical
politics, his achievements in algebraic geometry have fundamentally transformed the
mathematical landscape, perhaps no less than those of Cantor, Gödel and Hilbert, and he is
considered by some to be one of the dominant figures of the whole of 20th Century
mathematics.
Paul Erdös was another
inspired but distinctly non-
establishment figure of 20th
Century mathematics. The
immensely prolific and famously
eccentric Hungarian
mathematician worked with
hundreds of different
collaborators on problems in
combinatorics, graph theory,
number theory, classical analysis,
approximation theory, set theory,
and probability theory. The Mandelbrot set, the most famous example of a
The field of complex fractal
dynamics (which is defined by
the iteration of functions on complex number spaces) was developed by two Frenchmen,
Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia, early in the 20th Century. But it only really gained much
attention in the 1970s and 1980s with the beautiful computer plottings of Julia sets and,
particularly, of the Mandelbrot sets of yet another French mathematician, Benoît Mandelbrot.
Julia and Mandelbrot fractals are closely related, and it was Mandelbrot who coined the term
fractal, and who became known as the father of fractal geometry.
Paul Cohen is an example of a second generation Jewish immigrant who followed the
American dream to fame and success. His work rocked the mathematical world in the 1960s,

Page 33 of 38
when he proved that Cantor‘s continuum hypothesis about the possible sizes of infinite sets
(one of Hilbert’s original 23 problems) could be both true AND not true, and that there were
effectively two completely separate but valid mathematical worlds, one in which the continuum
hypothesis was true and one where it was not. Since this result, all modern mathematical
proofs must insert a statement declaring whether or not the result depends on the continuum
hypothesis.
Another of Hilbert’s problems was finally resolved in 1970, when the young
Russian Yuri Matiyasevich finally proved that Hilbert’s tenth problem was impossible, i.e. that
there is no general method for determining when polynomial equations have a solution in
whole numbers. In arriving at his proof, Matiyasevich built on decades of work by the
American mathematician Julia
Robinson, in a great show of
internationalism at the height of
the Cold War.
1976 saw a proof of the four
colour theorem by Kenneth
Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the
first major theorem to be proved
using a computer. The four colour
conjecture was first proposed
in 1852 by Francis Guthrie (a
student of Augustus De Morgan),
and states that, in any given Example of a four-colour map
separation of a plane into contiguous regions (called a “map”) the regions can be coloured
using at most four colours so that no two adjacent regions have the same colour. One proof
was given by Alfred Kempe in 1879, but it was shown to be incorrect by Percy Heawood in
1890 in proving the five colour theorem. The eventual proof that only four colours suffice
turned out to be significantly harder. Appel and Haken’s solution required some 1,200 hours of
computer time to examine around 1,500 configurations.
Also in the 1970s, origami became recognized as a serious mathematical method, in some
cases more powerful than Euclidean geometry. In 1936, Margherita Piazzola Beloch had
shown how a length of paper could be folded to give the cube root of its length, but it was
not until 1980 that an origami method was used to solve the “doubling the cube” problem
which had defeated ancient Greek geometers. An origami proof of the equally intractible
“trisecting the angle” problem followed in 1986. The Japanese origami expert Kazuo Haga
has at least three mathematical theorems to his name, and his unconventional folding
techniques have demonstrated many unexpected geometrical results.

Page 34 of 38
The British mathematician Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem for all
numbers in 1995, some 350 years after Fermat’s initial posing. It was an achievement Wiles
had set his sights on early in life and pursued doggedly for many years. In reality, though, it
was a joint effort of several steps involving many mathematicians over several years, including
Goro Shimura, Yutaka Taniyama, Gerhard Frey, Jean-Pierre Serre and Ken Ribet, with Wiles
providing the links and the final synthesis and, specifically, the final proof of the Taniyama-
Shimura Conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves. The proof itself is over 100 pages long.
The most recent of the great conjectures to be proved was the Poincaré Conjecture, which
was solved in 2002 (over 100 years after Poincaré first posed it) by the eccentric and reclusive
Russian mathematician Grigori man. However, Perelman, who lives a frugal life with his
mother in a suburb of St. Petersburg, turned down the $1 million prize, claiming that “if the
proof is correct then no other recognition is needed”. The conjecture, now a theorem, states
that, if a loop in connected, finite boundaryless 3-dimensional space can be continuously
tightened to a point, in the same way as a loop drawn on a 2-dimensional sphere can, then the
space is a three-dimensional sphere. Perelman provided an elegant but extremely complex
solution involving the ways in which 3-dimensional shapes can be “wrapped up” in even higher
dimensions. Perelman has also made landmark contributions to Riemannian geometry and
geometric topology.
John Nash, the American economist and mathematician whose battle against paranoid
schizophrenia has recently been popularized by the Hollywood movie “A Beautiful Mind”, did
some important work in game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations
which have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex
systems in daily life, such as in market economics, computing, artificial intelligence, accounting
and military theory.
The Englishman John Horton Conway established the rules for the so-called “Game of
Life” in 1970, an early example of a “cellular automaton” in which patterns of cells evolve and
grow in a grid, which became extremely popular among computer scientists. He has made
important contributions to many branches of pure mathematics, such as game theory, group
theory, number theory and geometry, and has also come up with some wonderful-sounding
concepts like surreal numbers, the grand antiprism and monstrous moonshine, as well as
mathematical games such as Sprouts, Philosopher’s Football and the Soma Cube.

Page 35 of 38
With the advent of
the Internet in the 1990s, the
Great Internet Mersenne
Prime Search (GIMPS), a
collaborative project of
volunteers who use freely
available computer software
to search for Mersenne
primes, has led to another
leap in the discovery rate.
Currently, the 13 largest
Mersenne primes were all
discovered in this way, and
the largest (the 45th
Mersenne prime number and
also the largest known prime Approximations for π
number of any kind) was discovered in 2009 and contains nearly 13 million digits. The search
also continues for ever more accurate computer approximations for the irrational number π,
with the current record standing at over 5 trillion decimal places.
The P versus NP problem, introduced in 1971 by the American-Canadian Stephen
Cook, is a major unsolved problem in computer science and the burgeoning field of complexity
theory, and is another of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s million dollar Millennium Prize
problems. At its simplest, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be efficiently
checked by a computer can also be efficiently solved by a computer (or put another way,
whether questions exist whose answer can be quickly checked, but which require an
impossibly long time to solve by any direct procedure). The solution to this simple enough
sounding problem, usually known as Cook’s Theorem or the Cook-Levin Theorem, has eluded
mathematicians and computer scientists for 40 years. A possible solution by Vinay Deolalikar
in 2010, claiming to prove that P is not equal to NP (and thus such insolulable-but-easily-
checked problems do exist), has attracted much attention but has not as yet been fully
accepted by the computer science community.
The Chinese-born American mathematician, Yitang Zhang, working in the area of
number theory, achieved perhaps the most significant result since Perelman, when he
provided a proof of the first finite bound on gaps between prime numbers in 2013.

Page 36 of 38
ACTIVITY # 17
(To be submitted on Tuesday February 2, 2021)
TASKS
1. What is the importance of mathematics in the modern world?
- Mathematics aids in our understanding of the world and is a good tool for developing
mental discipline. Logical reasoning, critical thinking, creative thinking, abstract or spatial
thinking, problem-solving abilities, and even successful communication skills are all
encouraged by math.
2. What have you learned about mathematics in the modern world? How does it affect the
future?
- It teaches us how to think rationally, identify and describe the problem clearly, plan how
to tackle the problem, and then evaluate and solve the problem using the appropriate
procedures. Mathematics aids in the organization of the world's patterns and regularities.
Mathematics aids in the prediction of natural and man-made occurrences. Mathematics
aids in the manipulation of nature and events in the world for our own benefit. forecast
events and make our lives easier.
3. What roles do mathematics play in your world?
- It allows us to recognize patterns, quantify correlations, and forecast the future. Math
assists us in comprehending the world around us. We also use the world to help us grasp
math. The entire planet is intertwined. Students can use it to make sense of the world and
solve difficult, real-world challenges. Mathematics is an excellent approach to develop mental
discipline while also encouraging logical reasoning and mental rigor. Furthermore,
understanding the topics of other educational courses such as science, social studies, and
even music and art is dependent on mathematical knowledge.

Criteria: Points:

Page 37 of 38
Content: your ability cogent, persuasive and relevant ideas and arguments 10
through sound reasoning and supporting examples
Organization: your ability to present your ideas in an organized and cohesive 5

fashion
Language: your control of the English language-specifically your word choice and 5
sentence structure
Grammar: your facility with the conventions of standard written English( grammar 5
and punctuation)
Total 25
End of seventeenth week

---------------------------------------------Nothing Follows--------------------------------------

Page 38 of 38

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SOUTH EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, INC.

National Highway, Crossing Rubber, Tupi, South Cotabato

GENERAL EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

COURSE CODE : MATH 100

To understand the most significant developments in Mathematics originated as global

The following are the topics to be discussed

Week 13 MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN MATHEMATICS

Week 14 RENAISSANCE MATHEMATICS

Week 15 MATHEMATICS DURING SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

Week 16 CONTINUATION OF MATHEMATICS DURING SCIENTIC

Week 17 MODERN AND FUTURE MATHEMATICS

Week 18 FINAL EXAMINATION

Instruction to the Learners

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN MATHEMATICS

During the centuries in which the Chinese, Indian and Islamic mathematicians had been in

Scholastic scholars only valued studies

From the 4th to 12th Centuries,

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

An important (but largely

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

1. What was the role of mathematics during Medieval European Ages?

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

End of thirteenth week

16th Century Mathematics

The cultural, intellectual

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

The Supermagic Square

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

17th Century Mathematics

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

1. What was the role of mathematics during Renaissance period?

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

2. Why was mathematics important in the Renaissance?

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

Most of the late 17th

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

Lagrange’s Mean Value Theorem

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

Pierre-Simon Laplace, sometimes referred to as “the French Newton”, was an important

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

Discussion Points and Exercise Questions

1. What role did mathematics play in the Scientific Revolution?

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

End of fifteenth week

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

NOTABLE PERSONS DURING SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

Discussion Points and Exercise Questions

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

Organization: your ability to present your ideas in an organized and cohesive 5

End of sixteenth week

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture

The 19th Century saw an

TPC 111 : Global Tourism, Geography And Culture