Pythagoras

It is sometimes claimed that we owe pure mathematics to Pythagoras, and he is often called the first
"true" mathematician. But, although his contribution was clearly important, he nevertheless remains a
controversial figure. He left no mathematical writings himself, and much of what we know about
Pythagorean thought comes to us from the writings of Philolaus and other later Pythagorean scholars.
Indeed, it is by no means clear whether many (or indeed any) of the theorems ascribed to him were in
fact solved by Pythagoras personally or by his followers

Plato

Although usually remembered today as a philosopher, Plato was also one of ancient Greece’s most
important patrons of mathematics. Inspired by Pythagoras, he founded his Academy in Athens in 387
BCE, where he stressed mathematics as a way of understanding more about reality. In particular, he was
convinced that geometry was the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. The sign above the
Academy entrance read: “Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here”.

Euclid

Euclid is often referred to as the “Father of Geometry”, and he wrote perhaps the most important and
successful mathematical textbook of all time, the “Stoicheion” or “Elements”, which represents the
culmination of the mathematical revolution which had taken place in Greece up to that time. He also
wrote works on the division of geometrical figures into into parts in given ratios, on catoptrics (the
mathematical theory of mirrors and reflection), and on spherical astronomy (the determination of the
location of objects on the "celestial sphere"), as well as important texts on optics and music.

Archimedes

Another Greek mathematician who studied at Alexandria in the 3rd Century BCE was Archimedes,
although he was born, died and lived most of his life in Syracuse, Sicily (a Hellenic Greek colony in
Magna Graecia). Little is known for sure of his life, and many of the stories and anecdotes about him
were written long after his death by the historians of ancient Rome. Archimedes produced formulas to
calculate the areas of regular shapes, using a revolutionary method of capturing new shapes by using
shapes he already understood. For example, to estimate the area of a circle, he constructed a larger
polygon outside the circle and a smaller one inside it. He first enclosed the circle in a triangle, then in a
square, pentagon, hexagon, etc, etc, each time approximating the area of the circle more closely. By this
so-called “method of exhaustion” (or simply “Archimedes’ Method”), he effectively homed in on a value
for one of the most important numbers in all of mathematics, π.

Diophantus

Diophantus was a Hellenistic Greek (or possibly Egyptian, Jewish or even Chaldean) mathematician who
lived in Alexandria during the 3rd Century CE. He is sometimes called “the father of algebra”, and wrote
an influential series of books called the “Arithmetica”, a collection of algebraic problems which greatly
influenced the subsequent development of number theory.

He also made important advances in mathematical notation, and was one of the first mathematicians to
introduce symbolism into algebra, using an abridged notation for frequently occurring operations, and
an abbreviation for the unknown and for the powers of the unknown. He was perhaps the first to
recognize fractions as numbers in their own right, allowing positive rational numbers for the coefficients
and solutions of his equations.

Brahmagupta

The great 7th Century Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta wrote some important
works on both mathematics and astronomy. He was from the state of Rajasthan of northwest India (he
is often referred to as Bhillamalacarya, the teacher from Bhillamala), and later became the head of the
astronomical observatory at Ujjain in central India. Most of his works are composed in elliptic verse, a
common practice in Indian mathematics at the time, and consequently have something of a poetic ring
to them.

It seems likely that Brahmagupta's works, especially his most famous text, the
“Brahmasphutasiddhanta”, were brought by the 8th Century Abbasid caliph Al-Mansur to his newly
founded centre of learning at Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris, providing an important link between
Indian mathematics and astronomy and the nascent upsurge in science and mathematics in the Islamic
world.

Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi

One of the first Directors of the House of Wisdom in Bagdad in the early 9th Century was an outstanding
Persian mathematician called Muhammad Al-Khwarizmi. He oversaw the translation of the
major Greek and Indian mathematical and astronomy works (including those of Brahmagupta) into
Arabic, and produced original work which had a lasting influence on the advance of Muslim and (after
his works spread to Europe through Latin translations in the 12th Century) later European mathematics.

The word “algorithm” is derived from the Latinization of his name, and the word "algebra" is derived
from the Latinization of "al-jabr", part of the title of his most famous book, in which he introduced the
fundamental algebraic methods and techniques for solving equations.

Leonardo of Pisa

The 13th Century Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better known by his nickname Fibonacci, was perhaps the
most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages. Little is known of his life except that he was
the son of a customs offical and, as a child, he travelled around North Africa with his father, where he
learned about Arabic mathematics. On his return to Italy, he helped to disseminate this knowledge
throughout Europe, thus setting in motion a rejuvenation in European mathematics, which had lain
largely dormant for centuries during the Dark Ages.

Madhava

Madhava sometimes called the greatest mathematician-astronomer of medieval India. He came from
the town of Sangamagrama in Kerala, near the southern tip of India, and founded the Kerala School of
Astronomy and Mathematics in the late 14th Century.

Although almost all of Madhava's original work is lost, he is referred to in the work of later Kerala
mathematicians as the source for several infinite series expansions (including the sine, cosine, tangent
and arctangent functions and the value of π), representing the first steps from the traditional finite
processes of algebra to considerations of the infinite, with its implications for the future development of
calculus and mathematical analysis.

Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia

In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in particular was famed for its
intense public mathematics competitions. It was in just such a competition, in 1535, that the unlikely
figure of the young Venetian Tartaglia first revealed a mathematical finding hitherto considered
impossible, and which had stumped the best mathematicians of China, India and the Islamic world.

Niccolò Fontana became known as Tartaglia (meaning “the stammerer”) for a speech defect he suffered
due to an injury he received in a battle against the invading French army. He was a poor engineer known
for designing fortifications, a surveyor of topography (seeking the best means of defence or offence in
battles) and a bookkeeper in the Republic of Venice.