Stephen Baldwin

memorizing the decimal of Pi to 128 place

an anemometer to record wind direction, a step for a street-car to record the
number of passengers carried, and an indicator for a street-car to show the street
name operated from the axle of the car. Soon after this he had an idea to build a
calculating machine, the invention for which he is most famous.

Blaise Pascal (17th century)

Pascal's Theorem, which states that, if a hexagon is inscribed in a circle, then the three
intersection points of opposite sides lie on a single line, called the Pascal line. As a young man,
he built a functional calculating machine, able to perform additions and subtractions, to help his
father with his tax calculations.
Pascal’s Triangle, a convenient tabular presentation of binomial co-efficients, where each
number is the sum of the two numbers directly above it.
This was the idea of equally probable outcomes, that the probability of something occurring
could be computed by enumerating the number of equally likely ways it could occur, and
dividing this by the total number of possible outcomes of the given situation.
the greatest “might-have-been” in the history of mathematics.

Gerolamo Cardano (16th century)

complex numbers, combinations of real and imaginary numbers of the type a + bi, where i is the
imaginary unit √-1.
contains perhaps the first systematic treatment of probability (as well as a section on effective
cheating methods).
he book described the - now obvious, but then revolutionary - insight that, if a random event has
several equally likely outcomes, the chance of any individual outcome is equal to the proportion
of that outcome to all possible outcomes.

Richard Dedekind
defined concepts such as similar sets and infinite sets. Dedekind also came up with the notion,
now called a Dedekind cut which is now a standard definition of the real numbers. He showed
that any irrational number divides the rational numbers into two classes or sets, the upper class
being strictly greater than all the members of the other lower class. Thus, every location on the
number line continuum contains either a rational or an irrational number, with no empty
locations, gaps or discontinuities.

Gaspard monge

The French mathematician and engineer Girard Desargues is considered one of the founders of
the field of projective geometry, later developed further by Jean Victor Poncelet and Gaspard
Monge. Projective geometry considers what happens to shapes when they are projected on to a
non-parallel plane. For example, a circle may be projected into an ellipse or a hyperbola, and so
these curves may all be regarded as equivalent in projective geometry.
inventor of descriptive geometry, a clever method of representing three-dimensional objects by
projections on the two-dimensional plane using a specific set of procedures, a technique which
would later become important in the fields of engineering, architecture and design. His
orthographic projection became the graphical method used in almost all modern mechanical
drawing.

Bonaventura Cavalieri
Italian mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri developed a geometrical approach to calculus
known as Cavalieri's principle, or the “method of indivisibles”.

Gregorio de saint

St Vincent's first mathematical investigations deal with problems related to refraction

and reflection.
elaborated the theory of conic sections on the basis of Commandino's editions
of Archimedes (1558), Apollonius (1566), and Pappus (1588). He also developed a
fruitful method of infinitesimals. His students Gualterus van Aelst and Johann
Ciermans defended his 'Theoremata mathematica scientiae staticae' (Louvain, 1624);
and two other students, Guillaume Boelmans and Ignaz Derkennis, aided him in
preparing the 'Problema Austriacum', a quadrature of the circle, which Gregorius
regarded as his most important result. He requested permission from Rome to print
his manuscript, but the general of the order, Mutio Vitelleschi, hesitated to grant it.
Vitelleschi's doubts were strengthened by the opinion that Christoph
Grienberger (Clavius's successor) rendered on the basis of preliminary material sent
from Louvain.
St Vincent's first investigations had to do with reflection and refraction. One of the
problems which arose was the trisection of an angle. In searching for ways to obtain
a trisection, St Vincent came across the series
1
/1 - 1/2 + 1/4 - 1/8 + ....
This series according to St Vincent equals 2/3, which he called the terminus. In
contrast with classical Greek mathematics, St Vincent thus accepts, for the first time
in the history of mathematics, the existence of a limit. While Euclid writes that "one
will obtain at last something smaller than the smallest quantity", St Vincent goes
further and boldly writes: "the quantity will be exhausted"
[Saint-Vincent] is essentially a man of one book: 'Opus geometricum'. But what a
book! It contains more than 1200 pages (in folio), and thousands of figures. It was
printed in Antwerp in 1647, but was never republished. One thing about the book
immediately stirred some uneasiness: the addition to the title, namely: 'quadraturae
circuli'. The engraved frontispiece shows sunrays inscribed in a square frame being
arranged by graceful angels to produce a circle on the ground: 'mutat quadrata
rotundis'. There was uneasiness in the learned world because no one in that world
still believed that under the specific Greek rules the quadrature of a circle could
possibly be effected, and few relished the thought of trying to locate an error, or
errors, in 1200 pages of text. Four years later, in 1651, Christiaan Huygens found a
serious defect in the last book of 'Opus geometricum', namely in Proposition 39 of
Book X, on page 1121. This gave the book a bad reputation.
Basically these procedures are closely related to the development of the integral
calculus and the numerical methods which were subsequently developed for the
calculation of logarithms form a fascinating study.
Basically, Saint-Vincent showed that the area under a rectangular
hyperbola xy = k over the interval [a, b] is the same as that over the interval [c, d]
if a/b = c/d. He therefore integrated x -1 in a geometric form that, although he does not
make the connection, is easily recognised as the logarithmic function. This connection
was in fact made by Saint-Vincent's pupil Alphonse Antonio de Sarasa (1618-1667).

John napier

The invention of the logarithm in the early 17th Century by John Napier (and later improved by
Napier and Henry Briggs) contributed to the advance of science, astronomy and mathematics
by making some difficult calculations relatively easy.
Napier also improved Simon Stevin's decimal notation and popularized the use of the decimal
point, and made lattice multiplication (originally developed by the Persian mathematician Al-
Khwarizmi and introduced into Europe by Fibonacci) more convenient with the introduction of
“Napier's Bones”, a multiplication tool using a set of numbered rods.
Girard, Albert
Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography
COPYRIGHT 2008 Charles Scribner's Sons

Girard, Albert

(B. St. Mihiel, France, 1595; d. Leiden, Netherlands, 8 December

1632)

Mathematics.

Girard’s birthplace is fixed only by the adjective Samielois that he

often added to his name, an adjective the printers of St. Mihiel often
applied to themselves in the seventeenth century. The city belonged
at that time to the duchy of Lorraine. The exact date of Girard’s birth
is subject to dispute. That of his death is known from a note in
the Journal of Constantijn Huygens for 9 December 1632. The place
of death is only conjectured.

Girard was undoubtedly a member of the Reformed church, for in a

polemic against Honorat du Meynier he accused the latter of injuring
“those of the Reformed religion by calling them heretics.” This
explainswhy he settled—at an unknown date—in the Netherlands,
the situation of Protestants being very precarious in Lorraine.

The respectful and laudatory tone in which he speaks of Willebrord

Snell in his Trigonomelry leads one to suppose that Girard studied
at Leiden. According to Johann Friedrich Gronovius, in his éloge of
Jacob Golius, in 1616 Girard engaged in scientific correspondence
with Golius, then twenty years old.

When Golius succeeded Snell at Leiden in 1629, Constantijn

Huygens wrote to him to praise the knowledge of Girard (vir
stupendus), particularly in the study of refraction. On 21 July of the
same year Pierre Gassendi wrote from Brussels to Nicholas de
Peiresc that he had dined at the camp before Boisle-Roi with “...
Albert Girard, an engineer now at the camp.” We thus know
definitely that Girard was an engineer in the army of Frederick
Henry of Nassau, prince of Orange; yet the only title that he gives
himself in his works is that of mathematician.

The end of Girard’s life was difficult. He complains, in his

posthumously published edition of the works of Stevin, of living in a
foreign country, without a patron, ruined, and burdened with a large
family. His widow, in the dedication of this work, is more precise.
She is poor, with eleven orphans to whom their father has left only
his reputation of having faithfully served and having spent all his
time on research on the most noble secrets of mathematics.

Girard’s works include a translation from Flemish into French of

Henry Hondius’ treatise on fortifications (1625) and editions of the
mathematical works of Samuel Marolois (1627–1630), of
the Arithmetic of Simon Stevin (1625), and of Stevin’s works (1634).
He also prepared sine tables and a succinct treatise on trigonometry
(1626; 1627; 2nd ed., 1629) and published a theoretical
work, Invention nouvelle en l’algèbre (1629). Although in the preface
to the trigonometric tables (1626) he promised that he would very
soon present studies inspired by Pappus of Alexandria (plane and
solid loci, inclinations, and determinations), no such work on these
matters appeared. Likewise, his restoration of Euclid’s porisms,
which he stated he “hopes to present, having reinvented them,”
never appeared.

Contributions to the mathematical sciences are scattered

throughout Girard’s writings. It should be said at the outset that,
always pressed for time and generally lacking space, he was very
stingy with words and still more so with demonstrations; thus, he
very often suggested more than he demonstrated. His notations
were, in general, those of Stevin and François Viète. “who
surpasses all his predecessors in algebra.” He improved Stevin’s
writing of the radicals by proposing that the cube root be written not
as but as (Invention nouvelle, 1629) but, like Stevin, favored
fractional exponents. He had his own symbols for > and <, and in
trigonometry he was one of the first to utilize incidentally—in several
very clear tables—the abbreviations sin, tan, and sec for sine,
tangent, and secant.

In spherical trigonometry, following Viète and like Willebrord Snell,

but less clearly than Snell, Girard made use of the supplementary
triangle. In geometry he generalized the concept of the plane
polygon, distinguishing three types of quadrilaterals, eleven types of
pentagons, and sixty-nine (there are seventy) types of hexagons
(Trigonométrie, 1626). With the sides of a convex quadrilateral
inscribed in a circle one can construct two other quadrilaterals
inscribed in the same circle. Their six diagonals are equal in pairs.
Girard declared that these quadrilaterals have an area equal to the
product of the three distinct diagonals divided by twice the diameter
of the circle.

Girard was the first to state publicly that the area of a spherical
triangle is proportional to its spherical excess (Invention nouvelle).
This theorem, stemming from the optical tradition of Witelo, was
probably known by Regiomontanus and definitely known by Thomas
Harriot-who, however, did not divulge it. Girard gave a proof of it
that did not fully satisfy him and that he termed “a probable
conclusion.” It was Bonaventura Cavalieri who furnished,
independently, a better-founded demonstration (1632).

In arithmetic Girard took up Nicolas Chuquet’s expressions “million,”

“billion,” “trillion,” and so on. He “explains radicals extremely close to
certain numbers, such that if one attempted the same things with
other numbers, it would not be without greatly increasing the
number of characters” (Arithmétique de … Stevin, 1625), He gave,
among various examples, Fibonacci’s series, the values 577/408
and 1393/985 for , and an approximation of . One should see in
these an anticipation of continuous fractions. They are also similar
to the approximation 355/113 obtained for π by Valentin Otho
(1573) and by Adriaan Anthoniszoon (1586) and to the
contemporary writings of Daniel Schwenter.

In the theory of numbers Girard translated books V and VI of

Diophantus from Latin into French (Arithmétique de é Stevin). For
this work he knew and utilized not only Guilielmus Xylander’s
edition, as Stevin had for the first four books, but also that of Claude
Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac (1621), which he cited several times. He
gave fourteen right triangles in whole numbers whose sides differ
from unity. For the largest the sides are on the order of 3 ×
1010 (ibid. p. 629).

Girard stated the whole numbers that are sums of two squares and
declared that certain numbers, such as seven, fifteen, and thirty-
nine, are not decomposable into three squares; but he affirmed, as
did Bachet, that all of them are decomposable into four squares
(ibid p. 662). The first demonstration of this theorem was provided
by Joseph Lagrange (1772). Girard also contributed to problems
concerning sums of cubes by improving one of Viéte’s techniques
(ibid., p. 676).

In algebra, as in the theory of numbers, Girard showed himself to be

a brilliant disciple of Viéte, whose “specious logistic” he often
employed but called “literal algebra.” In his study of
incommensurables Girard generally followed Stevin and the
tradition of book X of Euclid, but he gave a very clear rule for the
extraction of the cube root of binomials. It was an improvement on
the method of Rafael Bombelli and was, in turn, surpassed by that
which Descartes formulated in 1640 (Invention nouvelle).

Unlike Harriot and Descartes, Girard never wrote an equation in

which the second member was zero. He particularly favored the
“alternating order,” in which the monomials, in order of decreasing
degree, are alternately in the first member and the second member.
That permitted him to express, without any difficulty with signs, the
relations between the coefficients and the roots. In this regard he
stated, after Peter Roth (1608) and before Descartes (1637), the
fundamental algebraic theorem: “Every equation in algebra has as
many solutions as the denominator of its largest quantity” (1629).

A restriction immediately follows this statement, but it is annulled

soon after by the introduction of solutions which are “enveloped like
those which have ”. From this point of view, Girard hardly surpassed
Bombelli, his rare examples treating only equations of the third and
fourth degrees. For him the introduction of imaginary roots was
essentially for the generality and elegance of the formulas. In
addition, Girard gave the expression for the sums of squares,
cubes, and fourth powers of roots as a function of the coefficients
(Newton’s formulas).

Above all, Girard thoroughly studied cubic and biquadratic

equations. He knew how to form the discriminant of the
equations x3 = px + q, x3 = px2 + q, and x4 = px3 + q. These are
examples of the “determinations” that he had promised in 1626. The
first equation is of the type solved by Niccolò Tartaglia and Girolamo
Cardano, the second relates to book II of the Sphere of Archimedes,
and the third to Plato’s problem in the Meno, With the aid of
trigonometric tables Girard solved equations of the third degree
having three real roots. For those having only one root he indicated,
beside Cardano’s rules, an elegant method of numerical solution by
means of trigonometric tables and iteration. He constructed
equations of the first type geometrically by reducing them, as Viète
did, to the trisection of an arc of a circle. This trisection was carried
out by using a hyperbola, as Pappus had done. The figure then
made evident the three roots of the equation.

Girard was the first to point out the geometric significance of the
negative numbers: “The negative solution is explained in geometry
by moving backward, and the minus sign moves back when the +
advances. “To illustrate this affirmation he took from Pappus a
problem of intercalation that Descartes later treated in an entirely
different spirit (1637). This problem led him to an equation of the
fourth degree. The numerical case that he had chosen admitted two
positive roots and two negative roots; he made the latter explicit and
showed their significance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Original Works. Girard’s two books are Tables des sinus,
tangentes et sécantes selon le raid de 100,000 parties... (The
Hague, 1626: 1627; 2nd ed., 1629), which also appeared in Flemish
but had the Latin title Tabulae sinuum tangentium et secantium ad
radium 100,000 (The Hague, 1626; 1629); and Invention nouvelle
en l’algèbre (Amsterdam, 1629; repr. Leiden, 1884). The repr. of the
laner, by D. Bierens de Haan, is a faithful facs., except for the
notation of the exponents, in which parentheses are substituted for
the circles used by Girard and Stevin. However, the parentheses
had been used by Girard in the Tables.

Girard was also responsible for trans. and eds. of works by

others: Oeuvres de Henry Hondius (The Hague, 1625), which he
translated from the Flemish; Samuel Marolois’s Fortification ou
architecture militaire (Amsterdam, 1627), which he enlarged and
revised, and also issued in Flemish as Samuel Maroloys
Fortification... (Amsterdam, 1627), and Géométrie contenant la
theorie et practique d’icelle. necessaire à la Fortification... 2 vols.
(Ansterdam, 1627–1628; 1629), which he revised and also issued in
Flemish as Opera mathematica ofte wis-konstige, Wercken—
beschreven door Sam. Marolois — (Amsterdam, 1630); and Simon
Slevin’s L’arithmetique (Leiden, 1625), which he revised and
enlarged, and Les oeuvres mathématiques de Simon
Stevin (Leiden, 1634), also revised and enlarged.

II. Secondary Literature. On Girard or his work, see several articles

by Henri Bosmans in Mathesis, 40and 41 (1926); Antonio Favaro,
“Notizie storiche sulle frazioni continue,” in Bullettino di bibliografia e
di storia delle scienze mateniatiche e fisiche, 7 (1874), 533–596,
see 559–565: Gino Loria, Storia delle matematiche, 2nd ed. (Milan.
1950), pp. 439–444; Georges Maupin, “Étude sur les annotations
jointes par Albert Girard Samielois aux oeuvres mathématiques de
Simon Stevin de Bruges,” in Opinions et curiosités iouchant le
mathématiques II (Paris, 1902), 159–325; Paul Tannery, “Albert
Girard de Saint-Mihiel,” in Bulletin des sciences mathématiques et
astronomiques, 2nd ser.,7 (1883), 358–360, also in
Tannery’s Mémoires scientifiques, VI (Paris. 1926), 19–22; and G.
A. Vosterman van Oijen, “Quelques arpenteurs hollandais de la fin
du XVIeme et du commencement du XVIIeme siècle,” in Bullettino di
bibliografia e di storia delle scienze matematiche e fisiche, 3 (1870),
323–376, see 359–362.