From Europe with Love

   The third installment of the story of maths explored the Golden Age of Maths; shifting from the Middle East to Europe.

   By the 17th century, Europe took the crown from the Middle East as the powerhouse of mathematics. Discoveries churned left and right, with some ideas overlapping one another. Few have also intertwined mathematics with different fields of knowledge, such as art.

   This period in mathematical ideas saw the emergence of great mathematicians. The artist Piero della Francesca used mathematics in his painting and introduced perspective. Rene Descartes made it possible for algebra and geometry to merge. Pierre de Fermat discovery later led to the modern number theory. The discovery of calculus caused a rift between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. In the end, the Royal Society credited Newton as the first discover and Leibniz as the first publisher.

   Interestingly a family of mathematicians place high in the world of maths. Two members of the Bernoulli family were supporters of Leibniz's idea and eventually developed the calculus of variation. Leonhard Euler, a student of Johann Bernoulli, popularized the mathematical terms e, i, and π. Euler is considered as the father of topology or 'bendy geometry'. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the 'Prince of Mathematics', was the first to explain imaginary numbers. At a young age he was a genius; challenging Euclid's The Elements and having ideas hundred years ahead of his time. Another young mathematician, Janos Bolyai, studied imaginary geometries, later known as hyperbolic geometry. He was devastated when he learned that a study containing the same idea as his was already published two years prior by another mathematician named Nikolai Lobachevsky. Last but not the least, with knowledge from the foundations of geometry, Bernhard Riemann discovered that objects can exist in higher dimensions of space.

   The shift of attention from Middle East to Europe brought many great tidings to the world of maths. I can truly say that it was indeed the Golden Age of Maths with the number of discoveries and their corresponding escalated difficulties the mathematicians contributed. Their passion for knowledge and mathematics is truly amazing.