HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS

17th CENTURY
Explosion of mathematical and scientific ideas across Europe. Galileo, an Italian, observed the moons of Jupiter in orbit about that planet, using a telescope. Tycho Brahe, a Dane, had gathered an enormous quantity of mathematical data describing the positions of the planets in the sky.

 His student, Johannes Kepler, a German, began to work with this data. In part because he wanted to help Kepler in his calculations, John Napier, in Scotland, was the first to investigate natural logarithms. Kepler succeeded in formulating mathematical laws of planetary motion.

 Then, it developed by Ren Descartes (1596 1650), a French mathematician and philosopher, allowed those orbits to be plotted on a graph, in Cartesian coordinates. Building on earlier work by many predecessors, Isaac Newton, an Englishman, discovered the laws of physics explaining Kepler's Laws, and brought together the concepts now known as infinitesimal calculus.

 Independently, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in Germany, developed calculus and much of the calculus notation still in use today. It consisted of differential calculus and integral calculus, used for the techniques of differentiation and integration respectively. Science and mathematics had become international, which would soon spread over the entire world.

 Pierre de Fermat and Blaise Pascal set the groundwork for the investigations of probability theory and the corresponding rules of combinatorics in their discussions over a game of gambling.

 Muhammad Baqir Yazdi is an Iranian mathematician living 17th century. He contribute in amicable numbers. He was the last notable Islamic mathematician His major book is Oyoun Alhesab.

Amicable Numbers
Amicable numbers are two different numbers so related that the sum of the proper divisors of one of the numbers is equal to the other. For example, the smallest pair of amicable numbers is (220, 284); for the proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110, of which the sum is 284; and the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142, of which the sum is 220.

 Amicable numbers were known to the Pythagoreans, who credited them with many mystical properties. A general formula by which some of these numbers could be derived was invented circa 850 by Thbit ibn Qurra (826-901). Other Arab mathematicians who studied amicable numbers are al-Majriti (died 1007), alBaghdadi (980-1037), and al-Fris (1260-1320). The Iranian mathematician Muhammad Baqir Yazdi (16th century) discovered the pair (9363584, 9437056). Much of the work of Islamic mathematicians in this area has been forgotten.

 Then, Thbit's formula was rediscovered by Fermat (1601-1665) and Descartes (15961650), which people known them as the founder of the Amicable Numbers , and extended by Euler (17071783). Fermat and Descartes also rediscovered pairs of amicable numbers known from Arab mathematicians.

18th CENTURY
Leonhard Paul Euler is considered to be the pre-eminent mathematician of the 18th century and one of the greatest of all time. Euler introduced and popularized several notational conventions through his numerous and widely circulated textbooks. Most notably, he introduced the concept of a function and was the first to write f(x) to denote the function f applied to the argument x. He also introduced the modern notation for the trigonometric functions, the letter e for the base of the natural logarithm (now also known as Euler's number), the Greek letter for summations and the letter i to denote the imaginary unit. The use of the Greek letter to denote the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter was also popularized by Euler.

 Joseph-Louis Lagrange (25 January 1736 10 April 1813), born Giuseppe Lodovico (Luigi) Lagrangia, was an Italian-born mathematician and astronomer, who lived part of his life in Prussia and part in France, making significant contributions to all fields of algebra, number theory, equation and quadratic.

 Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace (23 March 1749 5 March 1827) was a French mathematician and astronomer whose work was very important to the development of mathematical astronomy and statistics.

 Amongst the other discoveries of Laplace in pure and applicable mathematics are: He with Alexandre-Thophile Vandermonde, discuss about the general theory of determinants, (1772); Proof that every equation of an even degree must have at least one real quadratic factor; Solution of the linear partial differential equation of the second order; He was the first to consider the difficult problems involved in equations of mixed differences, and to prove that the solution of an equation in finite differences of the first degree and the second order might be always obtained in the form of a continued fraction and In his theory of probabilities:
Evaluation of several common definite integrals and General proof of the Lagrange reversion theorem.