By: Travis Johnson MATHEMATICIANS

NICOLE ORESME Oresme was of lowly birth but excelled at school ( where he was taught by the famous jean buriden), became a young professor, and soon person chaplain to King Charles the fifth. The king commissioned him to translate the works of Aristole into French, and rewarded him by making him a bishop He wrote several books; and was a renowned philosopher, natural scientist, and important economist. Although the earth’s annual orbit around the sun was left to Copernicus, Oresme was among the pre-Copernican thinkers to claim clearly that the earth spun daily on its axis.

NICOLE ORESME Oresme used a graphical diagram to demonstrate the Merton college Theorem; it is said this was the first abstract graph. Oresme was also first to use fractional exponents; first to write of general curvature; and, most famously, first to prove the divergence of the harmonic series. His work was largely ignored, so it may have had little historic importance, but with several discoveries ahead of his time, Oresme deserves recognition

NICOLE ORESME This is one of Nicole’s books

NICOLE ORESME This is a picture o Nicole Oresme

EDMUND GUNTER Edmund Gunter’s father was welsh, coming from Gunterstown. Edmund attended Westminster school, then entered Christ church, Oxford on January He graduated in 1603 but he remained at Oxford until 1615 When he received the divinity degree of BD. Gunter was a friend of Briggs, and would spend much time with him at Gresham College discussing mathematical topics. When the professor of astronomy at Gresham College resigned in 1620 Gunter was appointed to fill the vacancy, largely on the recommendation of Briggs. Gunter published seven figure tables of logarithms of sines and tangets in 1620 in Canon Triangulorum, or Table of Artificial Sines and Tangets.

EDMUND GUNTER He made a mechanical device, Gunter’s scale, to multiply numbers based on the logs using a single scale and a pair of dividers. It was called the gunter by seamen and was an important step in the development of the slide rule. Gunter published his description in 1624 in Description and Use of the Sector. It is worth noting that in this work Gunter uses the contractions sin for sine and tan for tanget in his drawing of his scale although not in the text of the book He also invented Gunter’s chain which was 22 yards long with 100 links. It was used for surveying and the unit of area called an acre is ten square chains. Gunter also did important work on navigation, publishing New Projection of the Sphere in He also studied magnetic declination and was the first to observe the secular variation.

EDMUND GUNTER This is a picture of Edmund Gunter

EDMUND GUNTER This is Gunters’s chain

SOPHIE GERMAIN Sophie Germain was a french mathematician. Despite initial oppositon from her parents and difficulties presented by a sexist society, she gained education from books in her father’s library and from correspondence with famous mathematicians. Because of prejudice against her gender, she was unable to make a career out of mathematics, but she worked independently throughout her life In recognition of her contribution towards advancement of mathematics, an honorary degree was also conferred upon her by the university of Gottingen six years after her death

SOPHIE GERMAIN This a picture of her

SOPHIE GERMAIN This is a statue of her

SOPHIE GERMAIN This is a book about her

THE END

SOURCES Google, Wikipedia