On the 29th of April in the year of 1854 Henri Poincare was born in Nancy, France. He was born into a very influential and sophisticated family. His father was a professor of medicine at the University of Nancy, his sister married a spiritualist philosopher, and his cousin was the President and Prime Minister of France. Henri was said to be a very ill child because of diphtheria. He received special, private teaching from his mother because of this. It is said that Henri had excellent memory and could memorize lines and pages of text that he had read. He could also remember everything that he heard, word for word. Obviously, Henri was very talented, but he also had his defaults. He was physically very clumsy and lacked talent in the arts. This, however, wouldn’t hamper him from becoming one of the greatest mathematicians in history.
Since Henri was born into a family who was so talented in math and science, he also became infatuated with math and science. Although not much is known about his early life, it is known that Henri started his career very early. As a young adult in the 1870s, he studied mathematics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris followed by his studies at the Mining School in Caen. Henri Poincare then went back to Ecole to receive his doctorate in 1879. While studying, he discovered many things, one of which was new types of complex functions that immensely helped in the solving of a great many differential equations. These discoveries were some of the first “mainstream” or common ways to apply non-Euclidean geometry (which was discovered around 1830 by the Hungarian and Russian mathematicians Janos Bolyai and Nikolay Lobachevsky, respectfully. It was not really accepted by the rest of the mathematicians until ar...
... middle of paper ...
...he solar system. Some of the papers he wrote were coming close to what Einstein would later find to be the theory of special relativity. Henri wrote five books; four were published while he was still living, and the fifth was published posthumously in 1913. Henri Poincare died on the 17th of July in the year of 1912 in Paris, France. While not much is known of Henri’s death, it is known that he died suddenly without many of his friends or colleagues knowing about any illnesses that he might have had. It is said that his funeral was attended by many, including dozens of important people in science and politics. Henri Poincare was a man well known for his brilliance, and rightly so. Because of him, geometry is as advanced and accomplished as it is now, the study of space and the solar system was started, and mathematics is a well-known thing. Thank you, Mr. Poincare.
René Descartes was a good student; he got good grades and was liked by his teachers but was often ill. This sometimes took a toll on his studies. So ill that he was given permission to stay in bed until the afternoon because he was just too, sick and did not have it in him to get out and go to class. People say he would not get out of bed until past 11 everyday and that was on a good day. While at Boarding School, he studied rhetoric, logic, and the mathematical arts, which meant he also studied music and astronomy, and other intense studies that were stepping-stones for him to become a philosopher and effected his beliefs and ideas. After he left Boarding School in December of 1616, he went and got baccalaureate in law at the University of Poitiers four years later. During this period in his life, there are rumors that he snapped and had a nervous breakdown. However, there is no tru...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born to a highly educated family on July 1, 1646 in Leipzig. Leibniz’s father, Friedrich Leibniz, was a professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig and Catharina Schmuck, his mother, was the daughter of a professor of law. With the event of his father’s death, Leibniz was guided by his mother and uncle in his studies. He was also given access to the contents of his father’s library. In 1661 Leibniz began his formal university education at the University of Leipzig. While attending the university he soon met Jacob Thomasius. Thomasius instilled in Leibniz a great respect for ancient and medieval philosophy. After accepting his baccalaureate from Leipzig, Leibniz began studying at the University of Altdorf. While in attendance at Altdorf, Leibniz published Dissertation on the Art of Combinations (Dissertatio de arte combinatoria) in 1666 (Brandon C. Look, 2007). It sketched a plan for a “universal cha...
RENÉ DESCARTES by career being a Mathematician carried his interest of entering into the philosophy realm. At a very young stage, he decided that nature is to be explained with certainty as Mathematics. Mathematics in itself is very numerical, where the nature cannot be expressed numerically but is bound in a neat and clear cut way. Thus, his philosophy about everything in nature is very mechanical and machine-like.
His knowledge was thus gained mathematically. His importance was not only by proving ideas through mathematics, but by proving the existence of God. He tried to build a reliable foundation for knowledge with the idea of God. As Descartes states, "If God is all knowing, all good, and all powerful, he would not let us live in constant ignorance." He gives other individuals incentive to find the truth, even if they feel the basis of finding the truth is impossible.
He took his teaching duties very seriously, while he was preparing lectures for his charge on variety an of topics about science. The first scientific work dates were all from this period. It involves topics, which would continue to occupy him throughout his life. In 1571, he began publication of his track. It was intended to form a preliminary mathematical part of a major study on the Ptolemaic astronomical model. He continued to embrace the Ptolemaic (Parshall 1).
Blaise Pascal was born on 19 June 1623 in Clermont Ferrand. He was a French mathematician, physicists, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy that was educated by his father. After a horrific accident, Pascal’s father was homebound. He and his sister were taken care of by a group called Jansenists and later converted to Jansenism. Later in 1650, the great philosopher decided to abandon his favorite pursuits of study religion. In one of his Pensees he referred to the abandonment as “contemplate the greatness and the misery of man”.
No other scholar has affected more fields of learning than Blaise Pascal. Born in 1623 in Clermont, France, he was born into a family of respected mathematicians. Being the childhood prodigy that he was, he came up with a theory at the age of three that was Euclid’s book on the sum of the interior of triangles. At the age of sixteen, he was brought by his father Etienne to discuss about math with the greatest minds at the time. He spent his life working with math but also came up with a plethora of new discoveries in the physical sciences, religion, computers, and in math. He died at the ripe age of thirty nine in 1662(). Blaise Pascal has contributed to the fields of mathematics, physical science and computers in countless ways.
His father taught his Latin but after a while saw his son’s greater passion towards mathematics. However, Andre resumed his Latin lessons to enable him to study the work of famous mathematicians Leonhard Euler and Bernoulli. While in the study of his father’s library his favorite study books were George Louis Leclerc history book and Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond Encyclopedia, became Ampere’s schoolmasters (Andre). When Ampere finished in his father’s library he had his father take him to the library in Lyon. While there he studied calculus. A couple of weeks later he was able to do difficult treaties on applied mathematics (Levy, Pg. 135). Later in life he said “the new as much about mathematics when he was 18, than he knew in his entire life. His reading...
Etienne Pascal was very concerned about his son becoming an educated man. This is why he decided to teach his son on his own. He brought a young Blaise to lectures and other gatherings. He decided Blaise would not study math until age 15. When he made this decision he took all the math books out of the family home; however, this did not stop a curious Pascal. At age twelve, he started to work on geometry by himself. Blaise’s father finally started to take him to mathematical gatherings at "Academic Parisienne." At the age of 16, Pascal began to play an active role in "Academic Parisienne," as the principal disciple of Girard Desargues, one of the heads of "Academic Par...
Born in the Netherlands, Daniel Bernoulli was one of the most well-known Bernoulli mathematicians. He contributed plenty to mathematics and advanced it, ahead of its time. His father, Johann, made him study medicine at first, as there was little money in mathematics, but eventually, Johann gave in and tutored Daniel in mathematics. Johann treated his son’s desire to lea...
Carl Friedrich Gauss was born April 30, 1777 in Brunswick, Germany to a stern father and a loving mother. At a young age, his mother sensed how intelligent her son was and insisted on sending him to school to develop even though his dad displayed much resistance to the idea. The first test of Gauss’ brilliance was at age ten in his arithmetic class when the teacher asked the students to find the sum of all whole numbers 1 to 100. In his mind, Gauss was able to connect that 1+100=101, 2+99=101, and so on, deducing that all 50 pairs of numbers would equal 101. By this logic all Gauss had to do was multiply 50 by 101 and get his answer of 5,050. Gauss was bound to the mathematics field when at the age of 14, Gauss met the Duke of Brunswick. The duke was so astounded by Gauss’ photographic memory that he financially supported him through his studies at Caroline College and other universities afterwards. A major feat that Gauss had while he was enrolled college helped him decide that he wanted to focus on studying mathematics as opposed to languages. Besides his life of math, Gauss also had six children, three with Johanna Osthoff and three with his first deceased wife’s best fri...
...bsp;Using Analytic Geometry, geometry has been able to be taught in school-books in all grades. Some of the problems that are solved using Rene’s work are vector space, definition of the plane, distance problems, dot products, cross products, and intersection problems. The foundation for Rene’s Analytic Geometry came from his book entitled Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason in the Search for Truth in the Sciences (“Analytic Geomoetry”).
Burton, D. (2011). The History of Mathematics: An Introduction. (Seventh Ed.) New York, NY. McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
The 17th Century saw Napier, Briggs and others greatly extend the power of mathematics as a calculator science with his discovery of logarithms. Cavalieri made progress towards the calculus with his infinitesimal methods and Descartes added the power of algebraic methods to geometry. Euclid, who lived around 300 BC in Alexandria, first stated his five postulates in his book The Elements that forms the base for all of his later Abu Abd-Allah ibn Musa al’Khwarizmi, was born abo...
Rene Descartes was a famous French Philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Because of his work in his application of algebra to geometry we now have Cartesian geometry. His views about the relationship between the mind and body have been very influential over the last 3 centuries. He was born in La Haye (which is now known as Descartes) Tourine, France in 1596. His Family was far from wealthy but surprisingly all their children became well educated men. At eight years old Descartes was enrolled at a school of Jesuits, La Fleche in Anjou. He continued to study there for eight years. After graduating he studied at the University of Poitiers, majoring in law. He graduated their in 1616. He never practiced law but rather enrolled in the service of Prince Maurice of Nassau, who was the leader of United Provinces of the Netherlands. Descartes was fascinated with living a military life but his fascination of philosophy and mathematics soon overwhelmed his life. Descartes made a pilgrimage over to France and Italy in 1623 for many years and during that pilgrimage he studied philosophy and the science of optics. In 1628 He moved to the Netherlands where he wrote his most influential works. The first major work he wrote was Essais philosophoqies (Philosophical Essays) in 1637.