Geometry Timeline

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Ancient Babylonia

1830 BC - 1531 BC

The ancient Babylonians had a sexagesimal number system with a base sixty. It is shown that they had knowledge of the Pythagorean Theorem well before Pythagoras, and they estimated Pi to three, which would be correct if Pi was rounded to the nearest whole number

Thales

624 bc - 546 bc

Thales is credited as the first person to use deductive math reasoning. He found the distance from a ship to the shore and measured the height of the pyramids. His theorem states that if AC is the diameter, then angle ABC is a right angle.

Baudhayana Sulba Sutra

600 BC

The Baudhayana Sulba Sutra is attributed to the mathematican, who was most likely a priest as well, Baudhayana. It included what is now the Pythagorean Theorem, and Baudhayana discovered the value of Pi before Pythagoras.

Pythagoras

570 BC - 495 BC

Pythagoras is credited with creating the Pythagorean Theorem,
a2 + b2 = c2

Plato

427 BC - 347 Bc

Plato was a philosopher and though he was not a mathematician, a sign above the entrance to his academy said "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here". Mathematicians accepted his opinions on mathematics since he was held in such high esteem. Mathematicians did not you rulers or compasses, tools of a workman; they used compass and straight edges, more scholarly tools.

Euclid

300 BC

Euclid is a Greek mathematician and often referred to as the "father of geometry". His book, Elements, is one of the most influential works in math and served as one of the main text books in geometry from its publication to the late 19th century. Little is known about his life, which is why is birth date and death date are unknown.

Archimedes

287 BC - 212 BC

A greek mathematician who is credited with creating the exhaustion method.

Apollonius

262 BC - 190 BC

Apollonius is known for his writings on conics. He named its parts the parabola, the eclipse and circle, and the hyperbola.

Pi

250 BC

Pi is 3.14159265...; it is a never ending number and the ratio between a circle's circumference and diameter. Archimedes is the is the first person documented to use an algorithm to find out more about Pi. With Pi, we can find the are of a disk, or the circumference of the circle without having to measure both of them out.

The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Arts

100 BC

This was a book composed from works and ideas of many different Chinese scholars. It also employed methods in math that did not appear in Europe until the 13th century.

Heron of Alexandria

10 AD

Heron of Alexandria made a formula to find the area of a triangle with just the lengths of its sides. He is also the first to use the imaginary unit

Sine and Cosine

320 CE - 600 CE

Sine and Cosine can be traced back to the Indian Gupta Empire.

The Golden Ration

447

Two things are in the golden ratio if the both of the quantities added together equal the larger quantity compared to the smaller quantity. It was used in the Parthenon, and it is important in the geometry of regular pentagons and pentagrams

Perspective in Art

1415

The first linear perspective in art is thought to be used in Fillipo Brunelleschi during Renaissance. It made it so it was possible to create the illusion of a three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface.

La Geometrie

1637

La Geometrie is written by Renee Descartes. This was an written as an appendix to another of his books. In this book he combines algebra and geometry to make an algebraic geometry called analytical geometry. He also reduced geometric shapes into algebraic equations. Descartes is often credited with creating the coordinate plane.

Euler

1707 - 1783

A Swiss mathematician who found the Euler Line.

Non-Euclidean Geometry

1830

Bolyai and Lobachevsky are credited as the founders of Non-Eucliden geometry. There are three types of Non-Euclidean geometries: hyperbolic, elliptic, and spherical. All of these deal with constant curvature, and each of them based on the first four postulates of Euclid, but each has a different parallel postulate.

M. C. Escher

1898 - 1972

M. C. Escher was an artist and considered a research mathematician for his documentations in his notebook entitled " Regular division of the plane with asymmetric congruent polygons." His worked in tiling, and in his art he used complicated shapes such as the necker cube, and the penrose triangle.

Marjorie Rice

1923 - present

Marjorie Rice had no formal education in math except in high school, but she is still remembered for her discoveries in Geometry. She found 4 new ways to tile the plain with Pentagons

Roger Penrose

1931 - present

Roger Penrose created and made popular the penrose triangle. The penrose triangle is an impossible shape that looks real, but it couldn't actually exist. He also worked with Steven Hawkings and made several other developments in physics and cosmology.

Fractal

1975

A fractal, term coined by Benoit Mandelbrot, is a self similar pattern that is the same from near or far or nearly the same.