Republic of the Philippines

Laguna State Polytechnic University

Main Campus, Sta. Cruz, Laguna

COLLEGE OF TEACHER EDUCATION

HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS

FOURTEENTH CENTURY

CORINE C. COLOR
BSED 1D – Mathematics

DR. BENJAMIN O. ARJONA

Subject Professor
 Europe in the Fourteenth Centuries

The mid-fourteenth century marked the beginning of a transition between the

medieval and modern worlds. This transition is known as the Renaissance —
French for rebirth. The movement began in Italy and encompassed almost all
facets of life including politics, intellect, and art.

The Italian Renaissance

If the thirteenth century can be seen as the highest point of medieval

Europe, then perhaps the fourteenth century was the lowest. Although the
thirteenth century had given abundant promise for the future, many events
conspired to make the following century a period almost as dark as what
followed the collapse of Rome. The afflictions were those classic riders of the
Apocalypse: famine, plague, war, and death. The fourteenth century opened
with a series of heavy rainfalls so constant and so widespread that chroniclers
of the time compared it with the great good of Genesis. Not only did the climate
become wetter, but it turned significantly colder also, in what has been called
the Little Ice Age.

People of the fourteenth century saw the future as an endless

succession of evils; despair and defeat everywhere overwhelmed condence
and hope. The depressed mood of the time is preserved for us in the Danse
Macabre, or Dance of Death, an actual dance in pantomime performed with
public sermons, in which a figure from every walk of life confronts the corpse
he must become.

Yet the ultimate ruin by which Western civilization was threatened never
materialized. By approximately 1450, the calamities of war, plague, and famine
had tapered off, with the result that population increased, compensating for the
losses from 1300 on, and the towns began growing rapidly. Prosperity was once
again possible, provided that public order could be restored. The great majority
of the people of western Europe had become convinced that the ills of a strong
monarchy were less to be feared than weakness of government, that rebellion
was more dangerous to society than was royal tyranny. Thus, after two
centuries of chaos, political security returned with the advent of the “new
monarchies” of Louis XI in France (1461), Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain
(1477), and Henry VII in England (1485). The rise of these strong national states
marked the demise of feudalism and provided the solid foundation on which a
new European civilization could be built.

Two events helped to hasten this upsurge of interest in the literary

remains of antiquity: the fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453) and Johann
Gutenberg's invention of printing with movable, metallic type (about 1450).
Long before the Arabs had subjugated Egypt, fugitive scholars from Alexandria
had reached Constantinople with their books, making the fortress city the chief
resting place of what was left of classical literature in the original Greek. On
May 29, 1453, the Ottoman Turks seized the great city: even though
Constantinople had long been a mere enclave in Turkish territory, its fall
stunned Christendom. This collapse of the Byzantine empire drove a host of
Greek scholars to seek refuge on Italian soil, bringing with them a precious
store of classical manuscripts. Many of the treasures of Greek learning, hitherto
known indirectly through Arabic translations, could now be studied from the
original sources.

The 14th century saw the development of new mathematically concepts

to investigate a wide range of problems.[126] One important contribution was
development of mathematics of local motion.

Thomas Bradwardine proposed that speed (V) increases in arithmetic

proportion as the ratio of force (F) to resistance ® increases in geometric
proportion. Bradwardine expressed this by a series of specific examples, but
although the logarithm had not yet been conceived, we can express his
conclusion anachronistically by writing: V= log (F/R).[127] Bradwardine’s
analysis is an example of transferring a mathematical technique used by al-
Kindi and Arnald of Villanova to quantify the nature of compound medicines to
a different physical problem.[128]

One of the 14th-century Oxford Calculators, William Heytesbury, lacking

differential calculus and the concept of limits, proposed to measure
instantaneous speed “by the path that would be described by [a body] if… it
were moved uniformly at the same degree of speed with which it is moved in
that given instant”.[129]

Heytesbury and others mathematically determined the distance covered

by a body undergoing uniformly accelerated motion (today solved by
integration), stating that “a moving body uniformly acquiring or losing that
increment [of speed] will traverse in some given time a [distance] completely
equal to that which it would traverse if it were moving continuously through the
same time with the mean degree [of speed]”.[130]

Nicole Oresme at the University of Paris and the Italian Giovanni di

Casali independently provided graphical demonstrations of this relationship,
asserting that the area under the line depicting the constant acceleration,
represented the total distance traveled.[131] In a later mathematical
commentary on Euclid’s Elements, Oresme made a more detailed general
analysis in which he demonstrated that a body will acquire in each successive
of time an increment of any quality that increases increment as the odd
numbers. Since Euclid had demonstrated the sum of the odd numbers are the
square numbers, the total quality acquired by the body increases as the square
of the time.[132]

Nicole d’Oresme. One of the most distinguished of the medieval

philosophers was a Nicole d’Oresme, whose clerical career brought him to the
office of Bishop of Lisieux in 1377. D’Oresme had a wide-ranging intellect that
covered economics, physics, and mathematics as well as theology and
philosophy. He considered the motion of physical bodies from various points of
view, formulated the Merton rule of uniformly accelerated motion (named for
Merton College, Oxford), and for the first time in history explicitly used one line
to represent time, a line perpendicular to it to represent velocity, and the area
under the graph (as we would call it) to represent distance.

Regiomontanus. The work of translating the Greek and Arabic

mathematical works went on for several centuries. One of the last to work on
this project was Johann Miiller of Konigsberg (1436-1476), better known by his
Latin name of Regiomontanus, a translation of Konigsberg (King’s Mountain).
Although he died young, Regiomontanus made valuable contributions to
astronomy, mathematics, and the construction of scientific measuring
instruments. In all this he bears a strong resemblance to al-Tusi, mentioned
above. He studied in Leipzig while a teenager, then spent a decade in Vienna
and the decade following in Italy and Hungary. The last five years of his life
were spent in Nurnberg. He is said to have died of an epidemic while in Rome
as a consultant to the Pope on the reform of the calendar.

Regiomontanus checked the data in copies of Ptolemy’s Almagest and

made new observations with his own instruments. He laid down a challenge to
astronomy, remarking that further improvement in theoretical astronomy,
especially the theory of planetary motion, would require more accurate
measuring instruments.

He established his own printing press in Nurnberg so that he could

publish his works. These works included several treatises on pure mathematics.
He established Trigonometry as an independent branch of mathematics rather
than a tool in astronomy. The main results we now know as plane and spherical
trigonometry are in his book De triangulis omnimodis, although not exactly in
the language we now use.

Chuquet. The French Bibliotheque Nationale is in possession of the

original manuscript of a comprehensive mathematical treatise written at Lyons
in 1484 by one Nicolas Chuquet. Little is known about the author, except that
he describes himself as a Parisian and a man possessing the degree of
Bachelor of Medicine. The treatise consists of four parts: a treatise on arithmetic
and algebra called Triparty en la Science des nombres, a book of problems to
illustrate and accompany the principles of the Triparty, a book on geometrical
mensuration, and a book of commercial arithmetic. The last two are applications
of the principles in the first book.

Luca Pacioli. Written at almost the same time as Chuquet’s Triparty was
a work called the Summa de arithmetica, geometrica, proportioni et
proportionalite by Luca Pacioli (or Paciuolo) (1445-1517). Since Chuquet’s work
was not printed until the nineteenth century, Pacioli’s work is believed to be the
first Western printed work on algebra. In comparison with the Triparty, however,
the Summa seems less original. Pacioli has only a few abbreviations, such as
co for cosa, meaning Thing (the unknown), ce for censo (the square of the
unknown), and <E for <Equitur (equals). Despite its inferiority to the Triparty,
the Summa was much the more influential of the two books, because it was
published. It is referred to by the Italian Algebraists of the early sixteenth century
as a basic source.
REFERENCES

Burton, D. M. (2011). The history of mathematics: an introduction 7th Ed . David

M. Burton.
https://jontalle.web.engr.illinois.edu/uploads/298/HistoryMath-
Burton.85.pdf

History of mathematics. https://pdfcoffee.com/history-of-mathematics-pdf-

free.html.

[126] Grant, Edward and John E. Murdoch (1987), eds., Mathematics and Its
Applications to Science and Natural Philosophy in the Middle Ages,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ISBN 0-521-32260-X.

[127] Clagett, Marshall (1961) The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages,
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 421–40.

[128] Murdoch, John E. (1969) “Mathesis in Philosophiam Scholasticam

Introducta: The Rise and Development of The Application of Mathematics in
Fourteenth Century Philosophy and Theology”, in Arts libéraux et philosophie
Au Moyen Âge (Montréal: Institut d’Études Médiévales), at pp. 224–27.

[129] Clagett, Marshall (1961) The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages,
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 210, 214–15, 236.

[130] Clagett, Marshall (1961) The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages,
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), p. 284.

[131] Clagett, Marshall (1961) The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages,
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 332–45, 382–91.

[132] Nicole Oresme, “Questions on the Geometry of Euclid” Q. 14, pp. 560–
65, in Marshall Clagett, ed., Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of
Qualities and Motions, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).

Cooke, R. (2005). The history of mathematics: a brief course 2nd Ed. University
of Vermont.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118033098.