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 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“.

Luca Pacioli
● An important figure in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries is an Italian Franciscan friar.
● 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 in his 1509 book “The Divine
Proportion”.

The Divine Proportion

● Conclude that the number was a message from God and a source of secret knowledge
about the inner beauty of things.

Simon Stevin
● Flemish mathematician
● The use of decimal fractions and decimal arithmetic is usually attributed to him in the late
16th Century, although the decimal point notation was not popularized until early in the
17th Century.
● He 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.

Bologna University
● In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in particular was
famed for its intense public mathematics competitions.

Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia (1499-1557)

● 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.
● Went on to produce other important (although largely ignored) formulas and methods.
● Became known as Tartaglia (meaning “the stammerer”) for a speech defect he suffered
due to an injury he received in a battle against the invading French army.
● He was a poor engineer known for designing fortifications, a surveyor of topography
(seeking the best means of defence or offence in battles) and a bookkeeper in the
Republic of Venice.
● But he was also a self-taught, but wildly ambitious, mathematician.
● He distinguised himself by producing, among other things, the first Italian translations of
works by Archimedes and Euclid from uncorrupted Greek texts (for two centuries,
Euclid‘s “Elements” had been taught from two Latin translations taken from an Arabic
source, parts of which contained errors making them all but unusable), as well as an
acclaimed compilation of mathematics of his own.

Cubic Equations
● A cubic function, of the form ax³+bx²+cx+d, has 3 roots (where it crosses the x axis) and
2 critical points ( where the curve changes direction.)
● Cubic equations were first solved algebraically by del Ferro and Tartaglia.
● Tartaglia’s greates legacy to mathematical history, though, occurred when he won the
1535 Bologna University mathematics competition by demonstrating a general algebraic
formula for solving cubic equations (equations with terms including x3), something which
had come to be seen by this time as an impossibility, requiring as it does an
understanding of the square roots of negative numbers.
● In the competition, he beat Scipione del Ferro (or at least del Ferro’s assistant, Fior),
who had coincidentally produced his own partial solution to the cubic equation problem
not long before. Although del Ferro’s solution perhaps predated Tartaglia’s, it was much
more limited, and Tartaglia is usually credited with the first general solution. In the highly
competitive and cut-throat environment of 16th Century Italy, Tartaglia even encoded his
solution in the form of a poem in an attempt to make it more difficult for other
mathematicians to steal it.

Lodovico Ferrari
● Building on Tartaglia’s work, Lodovico Ferrari, an another young Italian, soon devised a
similar method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x⁴) and both
solutions were published by Gerolamo Cardano.
● Ferrari, on seeing Tartaglia’s cubic solution, had realized that he could use a similar
method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x4).
● Ferrari eventually came to understand cubic and quartic equations much better than
Tartaglia.

Gerolano Cardano (1501-1576)

 ● Published both solutions of Ferrari's similar method to solve quartic equations (equations
with terms including x⁴).
● Published perhaps the first systematic treatment of probability.
● Tartaglia’s definitive method was, however, leaked to Gerolamo Cardano (or Cardan)
● A rather eccentric and confrontational mathematician, doctor and Renaissance man, and
author throughout his lifetime of some 131 books.
● Cardano published it himself in his 1545 book “Ars Magna” (despite having promised
Tartaglia that he would not), along with the work of his own brilliant student Lodovico
Ferrari.
● Although both of the younger men were acknowledged in the foreword of Cardano’s
book, as well as in several places within its body, Tartgalia engaged Cardano in a
decade-long fight over the publication.
● Cardano argued that, when he happened to see (some years after the 1535 competition)
Scipione del Ferro’s unpublished independent cubic equation solution, which was dated
before Tartaglia’s, he decided that his promise to Tartaglia could legitimately be broken,
and he included Tartaglia’s solution in his next publication, along with Ferrari’s quartic
solution.
●

Complex numbers
● Despite a decade-long fight over the publication, Tartaglia, Cardano and Ferrari between
them demonstrated it's first uses.
● 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).
● Combinations of real and imaginary numbers of the type a + bi, where i is the imaginary unit √-1.
It fell to another Bologna resident, Rafael Bombelli, to explain, at the end of the 1560’s, exactly
what imaginary numbers really were and how they could be used.

✓ 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.