MATHEMATICS IN

MEDIEVAL EUROPE
PRESENTED BY:
NUR O. AMILIN BSED-III
MATHEMATICS
 MEDIEVAL AGES
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 theology.
Persian and Middle Eastern scholars made great
contributions to math during this time. Muhammad ibn
Musa Al-kharizmi made great advances in algebra being
able to solve quadratic equations with positive roots. Al-
Karaji also made several advances in algebra which is
sometimes termed algebraic calculus nowadays.
Spherical trigonometry, algebraic notation, and algebraic
geometry were some other
MEDIEVAL ABACUS
 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.
 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.;
Fibonacci, writing in the Liber Abaci, in 1202
and updated in 1254, produced the first significant
mathematics in Europe since the time of
Eratosthenes, a gap of more than a thousand years.
The work introduced Hindu-Arabic numerals to
Europe, and discussed many other mathematical
problems.
• Thomas Bradwardine proposed that speed (V) increases in
arithmetic proportion as the ratio of force (F) to resistance (R)
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).
• The Europeans learned Arabic in the 12 century. All
mathematics and astronomy was written in Arabic.During this
century there was a spate of translations of Arabic works to
Latin.
• Leonardo Pisano is better known by his nickname Fibonacci.
He played an important role in reviving ancient mathematics
and made significant contributions of his own.
• Fibonacci Liber abaci (Book of the Abacus), published in 1202
after his return to Italy, is based on bits of arithmetic and
algebra that Fibonacci had accumulated during his travels.
Liber abaci introduced the Hindu-Arabic place- valued decimal
system and the use of Arabic numerals into Europe.
• Liber abaci did not appear in print until the 19
century. A problem in Liber abaci led to the
introduction of the Fibonacci numbers and the
Fibonacci sequence for which Fibonacci is best
remembered today.
• Features of Liber abaci: - a treatise on algebraic
methods and problem which advocated the use of
Hindu-Arabic numerals. used the horizontal bar for
fractions. In fractions though the older systems of
unit and sexigesimal were maintained! contained a
discussion of the now-called Fibonacci Sequence.
 Medieval European interest in mathematics
was driven by concerns quite different from those of
modern mathematicians. One driving element was the
belief that mathematics provided the key to
understanding the created order of nature, frequently
justified by Plato .
Boethius provided a place for mathematics in
the curriculum in the 6th century when he coined the
term quadrivium to describe the study of arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy, and music. He wrote De
institutione arithmetica, a free translation from the
Greek of Nicomachus 's Introduction to Arithmetic.
In the 12th century, European scholars traveled
to Spain and Sicily seeking scientific Arabic texts,
including al-Khwārizmī 's ThebCompendious Book on
Calculation by Completion and Balancing, translated
into Latin by Robert of Chester
 Leonardo of Pisa, now known as Fibonacci ,
serendipitously learned about the Hindu– Arabic
numerals on a trip to what is now Béjaïa, Algeria with
his merchant father. (Europe was still using Roman
numerals .) . Leonardo wrote Liber Abaci in 1202
(updated in 1254) introducing the technique to Europe
and beginning a long period of popularizing it. The
book also brought to Europe what is now known as
the Fibonacci sequence .
 COMBINATORIC
Combinatorics is an ancient branch of
mathematics. In the Rhind Papyrus of Egypt, one of
the oldest mathematical texts in existence.A typical
problem in combinatorics is to determine the number
of possible configurations of a particular type, such as
the values that could occur when rolling a pair of dice.
Jewish mathematicians of the Middle Ages,
including Rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1092-
1167), who lived in Muslim Spain, and Levi ben
Gershom (1288-1344) of France, were particularly
interested in combinatorial problems.
 The Indian mathematician Bhaskara (1114-1185?)
included a number of algebraic and combinatorial
problems in his book Lilivati ("The Graceful," said to be
named for his daughter). Lilivati, is the computation of the
binomial coefficients.
Binomial coefficients are often written in a triangular
array called "Pascal's Triangle." The construct was named
for the famous French mathematician and scientist Blaise
Pascal (1623-1662), who developed many of the founding
principles of probability theory.
Combinatorial problems have often been associated
with games and puzzles. The Italian mathematician
Leonardo Fibonacci (1170?-1250?) is most famous for
devising a series in which each number is the sum of the
previous two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, . . . However, he is also
credited with the "Rabbit Problem" of combinatorics. This
puzzle requires the computation of the number of
descendents of a pair of rabbits.
 Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) employed combinatorics
to develop probability theory. The Swiss mathematician
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) solved the famous Königsberg
Bridge problem by proving it had no solution.

Around 1900, combinatorial theory contributed to graph

theory, symbolic logic, and topology. The first comprehensive
textbooks in the field, such as Eugen Netto's (1848-1919)
Lehrbuch der Combinatorik, were written at about this time.
Combinatorics became more prominent in mathematics in the
twentieth century, with the development of
computingtechnologies. Combinatorial problems arose in the
areas of computer design, information theory, and coding.
Graph theory has applications in designing and analyzing
transportation and communication networks and other
systems. However, the field still exists as a collection of
discrete problems and methods, and mathematicians
continue to search for a theory or set of principles to unify
them.
 ALGEBRA
• During the Middle Ages, while the intellectuals of
Christian Europe concerned themselves with
theology and the common people with subsistence
agriculture, a vibrant scientific and mathematical
culture developed in the Islamic world. Among its
achievements was the development of algebra.
• word "algebra" comes from al-Khwarizmi's book
Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabala, or The Compendious
Book on Calculation by Completing and Balancing.
In this book (referred to as the al-jabr ) al-
Khwarizmi described the art of finding the value of
an unknown quantity in equations by rearranging
terms.
 Among other Persian scholars to be concerned
with algebra was the Persian poet and astronomer
Abu'l- Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyami (1048-
1131), better known as Omar Khayyam. Khayyam's
poetry was translated into English in the nineteenth
century, but his mathematical work remained unknown in
the West until the 1930s. By 1079 Khayyam had written
a manuscript on cubic equations that gave the solution
of every type of cubic equations with positive real
number solutions. He also discovered a relation
between the coefficients generated by the expansion of
the binomial ( a + b ) that would be independently
discovered by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal
(1623-1662) six centuries later. The study of algebra
was reintroduced into Europe during the Renaissance.
 In 1545 a book entitled Ars Magna or The Great Art
by the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano (1501-
1576) appeared. This work incorporated significant new
results, including the solution of the cubic and quartic
equations. Cardano used letters to represent known
quantities, but unlike Diophantus he stopped short of using
other letters for the unknown quantities. The next major
step forward in algebraoccurred with the work of French
lawyer and writer François Viète (1540-1620), who
introduced themodern practice of using letters to represent
the unknown as well asknown quantities. With Viète's new
notation, it became easier to thinkof solving an algebraic
equation asfinding the values of x for which adefinite
function of the variable x would equal zero. This set the
stagefor the study of functions themselves and the study of
transformations of functions causedby introducing new
variables, ideasimportant in modern algebra, trigonometry,
and calculus.
 Algorithms to obtain various results have been
known, of course, throughout the history of
mathematics. Euclid (fl. c. 300 b.c.) for finding the
greatest common factor of two integers. In 1900 the
great German mathematician David Hilbert (1862-
1943) proposed that an algorithmight be found that
could produce a solution to any mathematical problem
expressed as a string of symbols.
A young British mathematician, Alan Turing
(1912-1954)Turing first described the operation of a
simple symbol processing machine, now called a
"Turing machine," that could be built from electronic
components and that has evolved into the digital
computer of the present day.
ALAN TURING
 KINEMATIC
• Kinematics is the study of motion. By the end of the
twelfth century the works of Aristotle on the subject
were being introduced into Western Europe,
frequently via translations from Arabic and Hebrew
intermediaries.
• Nicole Oresme (1320?-1382), a French
mathematician whose work anticipated many of the
developments of the next few centuries. In
particular, Oresme came up with the idea of
representing motion by a picture,
 Oresme had a great influence on Galileo (1564-
1642). It is certainly true that Galileo was in revolt
against many of the ideas about science taken for
granted in the educational system of his time. On the
other hand, Galileo also recognized the value of
Oresme's use of graphical representations for motion
and built on them in his own works for his fellow
scientists and the general public.
THANK YOU