INTERESTING  FACTS  OF  MATHEMATICS-2

1.   The ancient Egyptians did not use fractions.

2.   If you add up all the roulette numbers, you will get a mystical number of 666.

3.   Quadratic equations appeared in India 15 centuries ago.

4.   Euclid left many works on mathematics and geometry, which we still use. Interestingly, no information about Euclid himself was found.

      5. Rene Descartes introduced the concepts of real and imaginary numbers.

       6.Interestingly, the great emperor Napoleon Bonaparte left some mathematical works after his death.

        7.The Indian scholar Budhayana, who lived in the 6th century, is considered the first to use the Pi number.

        8.Johannes Widmann first recorded the classic signs of addition and subtraction. It happened about 500 years ago.

       INTERESTING FUN FACTS OF MATHEMATICS

1. You can cut a cake into 8 pieces by using only 3 cuts.

You just need to make two cuts in a vertical plane and one in a horizontal plane. 

 2. The numbers on opposite sides of a dice always add up to seven

 On a dice the numbers 1,2 and 3 all share a vertex.  If these three numbers run clockwise round this vertex then the dice is called left-handed and if the three numbers run anti-clockwise round the vertex, then it is a right-handed dice.   Chinese dice are normally left-handed and Western dice are normally right-handed.

3. William Shanks calculated pi to 707 decimal places but made a mistake on the 528^th digit.

Amateur mathematicia William Shanks (1812-1882) spent a good part of his life calculating mathematical constants by hand.  Shanks never found out about his mistake as it wasn’t revealed until after his death.

4. The word googol was made up by a 9-year old boy

In the 1930s an American Mathematician named Edward Kasner asked his nine-year old nephew Milton Sirotta to make up a word for him to use. Milton made up the world ‘googol’ which Edward Kasner later used to describe the number  .  The search engine Google was later named after the ‘googol’ meaning that Milton Sirotta had unwittingly helped name one of the world’s most famous companies.

5. The word “hundred” comes from the old Norse term, “hundrath”, which actually means 120 and not 100. In a room of 23 people there’s a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.

                    DIOPHANTUS

                Diophantus was an Alexandrian Greek mathematician, born somewhere between 200 and 214 BC. Alexandria was the center of Greek culture and knowledge and Diophantus belonged to the ‘Silver Age’ of Alexandria. His life story is not known in detail however we do have some dates acquired from a mathematical puzzle known as ‘Diophantus’s Riddle’. 

Contribution to Mathematics

           ‘Arithmetika’ a major work of Diophantus, is considered to be the most noticeable and influential work done on algebra in Greek history. His style was very different; he never used general methods in working out a problem. A method used for one problem could not be used to solve even another very similar problem. Diophantus wrote many books but unfortunately only a few lasted. He did a lot of work in algebra, solving equations in terms of integers. Some of his equations resulted in more than one answer possibility. There are now called ‘Diophantine’ or ‘Indeterminate’. It was none other than Diophantus who started the use of a symbol to specify the unidentified quantities in his equations. His style of algebra is known as the ‘syncopated’ style of algebraic writing, in which he represented polynomials as one unknown. 

                       HIPPARCHUS

     Hipparchus, better known as Hipparchos was a Greek mathematician born in 190 BC. Not much is known about Hipparchus’s life however it is deduced that his place of birth was Nicaea in Bithynia which is modern day Turkey. Though being one of the most influential mathematicians and astronomers, the details of his work are very scarce the most definite survived piece being his commentary on a poem by Aratus from the 3rd century the ‘Commentary on the Phainomena of Eudoxus and Aratus’. Also in the list of his contributions are his books on optics and arithmetic, writings concerning geography and astrology and a treatise called ‘On Objects Carried Down by their Weight’. 

Contribution to mathematics:

         His contributions to astronomy are believed to be of significant use in modern day applications of the field. Being the first to calculate a heliocentric system he left his work as according to his calculations the orbits were not truly circular as was the belief of science of that time. Hipparchus had observed the stars from a time span of 147 to 127 BC using an instrument called ‘dioptra’. Some historians suggest that he was the inventor of ‘Planispheric Astrolabe’, an astronomical device. It was none other than Hipparchus who raised important questions such as what the length of a year was and what the lunar distances were. Curious to find an answer, Hipparchus extensively studied the solar and lunar motions and their orbits using several calculations and techniques. He also determined the distances and sizes of both the sun and moon.

       INTERESTING  FACTS  OF  MATHEMATICS-1

1.   The first woman engaged in mathematics was Hypatia from Alexandria.

2.   Equal sign invented in 1557 by Robert Recorde.

3.   If you add numbers from 1 to 100, you get 5050.

4.   Residents of Taipei are officially allowed not to use the number four (4), because it is considered to be “unlucky number”, and its meaning incorporated with the word “death”. Therefore, there are many buildings with no 4th floor, and after the third one, there is a 5th floor.

5.   Muslim mathematician Al-Khwarizmi is considered to be “the Father of Algebra”

6.   Despite the fact that many educated people lived in the Roman Empire, there was no number 0 in their mathematics. It is hard to imagine how they managed their life without the number 0 (zero)

7.   You may have already heard this story somewhere before. George Dantzig when he was a doctoral candidate at the University of California, he was late for a lecture. Seeing on the board some equations, he mistakenly took them for homework. Arriving home, he solved them, although he found the task rather difficult. Bringing them to the next lesson, he learned that these were 2 math problems that had been considered unsolvable.

8.   Negative numbers first appeared in the “Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art” in the period of Chinese Han Dynasty (202 BC- 220 AD)

            DIOCLES CONTRIBUTION TO MATHEMATICS

                 Although little is known about the life of Diocles, it is known that he was a contemporary of Apollonius and that he flourished sometime around the end of the 3rd century BC and the beginning of the 2nd century BC.

            Diocles is thought to be the first person to prove the focal property of the parabola. His name is associated with the geometric curve called the Cissoid of Diocles, which was used by Diocles to solve the problem of doubling the cube. The curve was alluded to by Proclus in his commentary on Euclid and attributed to Diocles by Geminus as early as the beginning of the 1st century.

           Fragments of a work by Diocles entitled On burning mirrors were preserved by Eutocius in his commentary of Archimedes' On the Sphere and the Cylinder. Historically, On burning mirrors had a large influence on Arabic mathematicians, particularly on al-Haytham, the 11th-century polymath of Cairo whom Europeans knew as "Alhazen". The treatise contains sixteen propositions that are proved by conic sections. One of the fragments contains propositions seven and eight, which is a solution to the problem of dividing a sphere by a plane so that the resulting two volumes are in a given ratio. Proposition ten gives a solution to the problem of doubling the cube. This is equivalent to solving a certain cubic equation. Another fragment contains propositions eleven and twelve, which use the cissoid to solve the problem of finding two mean proportionals in between two magnitudes. Since this treatise covers more topics than just burning mirrors, it may be the case that On burning mirrors is the aggregate of three shorter works by Diocles. In the same work, Diocles, just after demonstrating that the parabolic mirror could focus the rays in a single point, he mentioned that It is possible to obtain a lens with the same property.