MATH 211: Mathematician of the Day

Each day we note a mathematician whose contributions bear on the subject matter of the day's material. Below is a listing of previous winners of the coveted Mathematician of the Day award.

DATE

8/26: Rene Descartes (1596-1650).

Introduced current notation for symbolically describing the connections between equations and graphs.

8/28: Pythagoras (ca.580 BC-ca.520 BC) and Euclid (ca.365 BC-ca.300 BC).

Pythagoras is considered the first ``real" mathematician. He and his followers proved many of the fundamental results of geometry. Euclid is best known for his treatise on geometry, The Elements. Here, he assimilated for the first time the known results of geometry from antiquity.

9/2: John Napier (1550-1617).

A Scottish part-time mathematician and taunter of Catholics, Napier is best remembered for developing logarithms.

9/4: Leonhard Euler (1707-1783).

The first to use the concept of ``function" consistently in analysis, and the first to formulate the ideas of calculus in terms of functions. Euler also introduced much of the notation that we use today, including the Greek letter pi for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, i for the imaginary unit, and e for the base of the natural logarithm.

9/9: Charles Babbage (1792-1871).

Invented the principle of the analytical engine, the forerunner of the modern digital computer.

9/11: Johann Bernoulli (1667-1748).

Bernoulli was the mathematician behind the first calculus textbook, ``Analyse des infiniment petits" (``Analysis of the Infinitely Small"), by l'Hopital.

9/18: Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

Co-developer of calculus.

9/25: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716).

Co-developer of calculus. During a visit to France, Leibniz became aquainted with the work of Descartes, Fermat, and others. He developed these ideas, independently of Newton, into calculus. Leibniz thought of calculus in terms of analysis, whereas Newton subscribed to a more geometrical perspective. For example, Leibniz described the definite integral in terms of sums, while Newton interpreted the definite integral as the area of a plane region. Leibniz is also responsible for introducing much of the modern calculus notation.

9/30: Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665).

French lawyer and city councilman who studied mathematics as a hobby. Fermat proposed the idea of attaching tangent lines to graphs, and approximating the slope of a tangent line via secant lines, although his approach was not given in terms of limits, as we use now. Fermat also used tangent lines to determine local maximum and minimum values of graphs; his method was essentially the same that we use today.

10/2: Johann Hudde (1628-1704).

Discovered Hudde's Rule, which essentially gives formula for the derivative of a polynomial. Hudde did this algebraically, with no notion of limits or infinitely small quantities.