Al-Khwarizmi was born in the epicentre of an Islamic empire which then stretched from the Mediterranean to India. This was a very fortuitous time for Arabic learning. The rulers of the Abbasid dynasty who were leading this huge empire, founded an academy in Baghdad called the House of Wisdom where the learned men collected and translated all the scientific works that they could get hold of. House of Wisdom had a large library – first famous library established after the library of Alexandria was destroyed.
Al-Khwarizmi was one of the learned men who worked in the House of Wisdom. His interests lied in the fields of algebra, geometry, astronomy and geography. His now most famous work is that from which we got the name for algebra itself – Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala.
Abu Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780, Khwarizm – c. 850) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer, who worked most of his life as a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
His Algebra was the first book on the systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. Consequently he is considered to be the father of algebra, a title he shares with Diophantus. Latin translations of his Arithmetic, on the Indian numerals, introduced the decimal positional number system to the Western world in the twelfth century. He revised and updated Ptolemy’s Geography as well as writing several works on astronomy and astrology.
Also filed in Astrology Scientists, Astronomy Scientists, Famous Scientists, Geographics Scientists, Moslem Scientists
|
Tagged algebra, algoritm, arab scientists, Arithmetic, astronomer, geographer, mathematician, Moslem Scientists
|
Warning: strpos() [
function.strpos]: Empty delimiter in
/home/hpenyet/public_html/scientists/wp-content/plugins/seo-image/seo-friendly-images.php on line
225
Warning: strpos() [
function.strpos]: Empty delimiter in
/home/hpenyet/public_html/scientists/wp-content/plugins/seo-image/seo-friendly-images.php on line
225
Warning: strpos() [
function.strpos]: Empty delimiter in
/home/hpenyet/public_html/scientists/wp-content/plugins/seo-image/seo-friendly-images.php on line
225
Warning: strpos() [
function.strpos]: Empty delimiter in
/home/hpenyet/public_html/scientists/wp-content/plugins/seo-image/seo-friendly-images.php on line
225
Italian mathematician and philosopher, considered to be the first woman in the Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (May 16, 1718 – January 9, 1799) was an Italian linguist, mathematician, and philosopher. Agnesi is credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus. She was an honorary member of the faculty at the University of Bologna. According to Dirk Jan Struik, Agnesi is “the first important woman mathematician since Hypatia (fifth century A.D.)”.
Early life
Her father, Pietro, was a wealthy man of business and a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna who desired to elevate his family into the Milanese nobility.
Having been born in Milan, Maria was recognized as a child prodigy very early; she could speak both French and Italian at five years of age. By her eleventh birthday she had acquired Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Latin, and was referred to as the “Walking Polyglot”. She even educated her younger brothers. When she was 9 years old, she composed and delivered an hour-long speech in Latin to an academic gathering. The subject was women’s right to be educated. When she was fifteen, her father began to regularly gather in his house a circle of the most learned men in Bologna, before whom she read and maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions. Records of these meetings are given in Charles de Brosses’ Lettres sur l’Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which her father had published in 1738. These displays, being probably not altogether congenial to Maria (who wanted to retire) ceased by her twentieth year because she strongly desired to enter a convent at that time. Although her father refused to grant this wish, he agreed to let her live from that time on in an almost conventual semi-retirement, avoiding all interactions with society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. During that time, Maria studied both differential and integral calculus. Pietro Agnesi also married twice more after Maria’s mother died, so that Maria Agnesi ended up the eldest of 21 children. In addition to her performances and lessons, her responsibility was to teach her siblings. This task kept her from her own goal of entering a convent. Scholars thought she was dazzingly beautiful and hers was recognized as one of the richest noble families in Milan.
English physicist and mathematician who was born into a poor farming family. Luckily for humanity, Newton was not a good farmer, and was sent to Cambridge to study to become a preacher. At Cambridge, Newton studied mathematics, being especially strongly influenced by Euclid, although he was also influenced by Baconian and Cartesian philosophies. Newton was forced to leave Cambridge when it was closed because of the plague, and it was during this period that he made some of his most significant discoveries. With the reticence he was to show later in life, Newton did not, however, publish his results.
Sir Isaac Newton, FRS (4 January 1643 - 31 March 1727 was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.
In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he built the first “practical” reflecting telescope[6] and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound.
In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalised binomial theorem, developed the so-called “Newton’s method” for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.
Euclid, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician and is often referred to as the Father of Geometry. He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323 BC-283 BC). He is the author of Elements which gives the principles of what is now called Euclidean geometry deduced from a small set of axioms. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory, and rigor.
Biographical knowledge
Little is known about Euclid other than his writings. What biographical information we do have comes largely from commentaries by Proclus and Pappus of Alexandria. Euclid was active at the great Library of Alexandria and may have studied at Plato’s Academy in Greece. The date and place of Euclid’s birth and the date and circumstances of his death are unknown.
Some writers in the Middle Ages confused him with Euclid of Megara, a Greek Socratic philosopher who lived approximately one century earlier.
Italian scientist and philosopher. Galileo was a true Renaissance man, excelling at many different endeavors, including lute playing and painting. He attended medical school in Padua. While in a cathedral, he noticed that a chandelier was swinging with the same period as timed by his pulse, regardless of its amplitude. He began to study the isochronism of the pendulum Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics in 1581, as well as the motion of bodies. Using an inclined plane, he showed that all bodies fall at the same rate. He also investigated cohesion, Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics and concluded that a waterfall breaks when the weight of the water Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics becomes too great, the same reason that water Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics pumps could only raise water by 34 feet.
Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was a Tuscan (Italian) physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics“, the “father of science“, and “the Father of Modern Science.” The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, taught in nearly all high school and introductory college physics courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of kinematics. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons in his honour, and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, improving compass design.
