-
3000 BCE
Ancient (Egypt)
The geometry of Egypt was mostly experimentally derived rules used by the engineers of those civilizations. They developed these rules to estimate and divide land areas, and estimate volumes of objects. Some of this was to estimate taxes for landowners.
Ahmes (1680-1620 BC) - wrote the Ahems Papyrus,
contain rules of division and includes the solutions of equations,progression,etc. -
1500 BCE
India
It is not historically clear whether this mathematics was developed by the Indian Vedic culture, or whether it was borrowed from the Babylonians,Like the Babylonians, results in the Sulbasutras are stated in terms of ropes; and "sutra" eventually came to mean a rope for measuring an altar. ltimately, the Sulbasutras are simply construction manuals for some basic geometric shapes.
Manava (750-690 BC)-constructions of circles from rectangles and squares from circles .
pie= 25/8=3.125 -
1100 BCE
China
Yang Hui (1238-1298)
was a late-Song dynasty Chinese mathematician from Qiantang.
Yang worked on magic squares , magic circles and the binomial theorem he’s known for his contribution of presenting Yang Hui’s Triangle. -
600 BCE
Greek
Thales of Miletus (624-647BC) was one of the seven pre-socrative saves and brought geometry from Egypt to Greece .
He is famous for the discovery of five facts
in geometry , one being that an angle in a semicircle is a right angle.
Plato (427-347 BC) Founded “The Academy” in 387 BC -529 AD and also developed a theory of forms in his book “Phadeo”.
He emphasized the idea of “proof” and wanted accurate definitions and clear hypothesis. -
940
Middle Ages (Islamic)
Abū Sahl Wayjan Rustam al-Qūhī his explanation of the construction of a regular heptagon best shows his innovation as a geometer and his contribution to islamic mathematics by providing solutions to “impossible” problems within known mathematical theories. -
17th century middle ages
Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) He also developed a method for determining maxima, minima and tangents to curved lines foreshadowing calculus and is famous for fermat's last theorem
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was the co-inventor of modern projective geometry and is famous for pascal's triangle. -
18th century middle ages
Gaspard Monge (1746-1818) is considered the father of both descriptive geometry in "Geometrie descriptive" (1799); and differential geometry in "Application de l'Analyse a la Geometrie" (1800) where he introduced the concept of lines of curvature on a surface in 3-space.
Leonhard Eulerwas 1707-1783 extremely prolific in a vast range of subjects, and is the greatest modern mathematician. He founded mathematical analysis, and invented mathematical functions, differential equations. -
19th century middle ages
Hermann Grassmann (1809-1877) was the creator of vector analysis and the vector interior (dot) and exterior (cross) products
Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) was the next great developer of differential geometry, and investigated the geometry of "Riemann surfaces" -
Modern
Donald Coxeter (1907-2003) he made important contributions to the theory of polytopes, non-Euclidean geometry, group theory and combinatorics. Coxeter is noted for the completion of Euclid's work by giving the complete classification of regular polytopes in n-dimensions using his "Coxeter groups". He published many important books, including Regular Polytopes in 1947, 1963, 1973, and Introduction to Geometry in 1961, 1989. -
Babylon
The Babylonians replaced the older (4000 BC - 2000 BC) Sumerian civilization around 2000 BC. The Sumerians had already developed writing (cuniform on clay tablets) and arithmetic (using a base 60 number system). The Babylonians adopted both of these. But, Babylonian math went beyond arithmetic, and devloped basic ideas in number theory, algebra, and geometry.
Yale Tablet (YBC 7289)
Shows how to compute the diagonal of a square. -
Resourses
http://geomhistory.com/html/modern_geometry.html
storyofmathematics.com
