The Masterpiece of the North

Movie Review 3
The Story of Math episode 3

          The journey towards the discovery of the existence of mathematics had come across the ancient countries of Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia. It then had fallen upon on the hands of the genius of the east and made its own way to the unearthing of its advancement brought by Chinese, Indian, Islamic empire, Persian and Italian. Now it had trek its way to the northern part of the globe.  The great unleashing of mathematical phenomena was put into view in the terrain of France, Holland, Britain, Germany, Switzerland

         The trail had gone to visit the northern part of Italy to behold the works of art of a renaissance artist who used the idea of perspective.  Piero della Francesca, an artist and a mathematician had made mathematics and arts coalesce together. The illusion of perspective was under the principle of mathematics; calculations of the size and distance were made. It turned out to be a new mathematical language on how to map things together at a point.  Perspective had been the structure to understand geometry in a new aspect. By the seventeenth century, Europe had turned out to be the dominating abode of mathematical ideas and discoveries. In which geometry had gone a lot of progress and development.

          In France, they had a street after the great mathematician Rene Descartes as a sign of veneration to his discoveries. Descartes is an outstanding mathematician theoretical physicist and great philosopher, who thought that mathematics was to be constructed through philosophy. He went to Leiden and surrounded himself with people who believe in his radical ideas. He put algebra and geometry in unanimity. He thought that curve can be proved as a part of the circle through expressing it to numbers and further calculate it with derived formulas he made.  Furthermore, Descartes had got to the bottom of figuring the possibility of navigating geometry of higher dimension that is essential to physics and modern technologies. Another mathematician from the time of Descartes, who had his discovery of some prime number named after him was Marin Mersenne. He went to the same school with Descartes. He publicized the work of Pierre de Fermat on the properties of numbers. Fermat had come to concoct modern number theory that consists of conjectures and theorems concerning numbers as well as his Last Theorem. Fermat’s passion to mathematics had led him to new patterns of number and perceived the puzzle side of mathematics. In addition, Fermat had found an application to those patterns of numbers. It had become the basis of the codes that protect the credit card transactions over the internet. This theorem was called Little Theorem.

          In Britain, they had an eminent statue of a mathematician as an accolade to his greatness. A store was labeled after his name, a plaque in a school he went to and a museum that has various flaunt of the famous Isaac Newton. Newton had developed new theory of light, discovered gravity along with the invention of the great breakthrough of mathematics and physics, the calculus; which is crucial to understanding the behaviour of moving objects. It is used by engineers and physicist nowadays as it elucidates the mathematics of motion.  Calculus had become the perception behind the revolution of things in our world.  But Newton was not the only one who came up with this idea. A mathematician from the northern Germany had discovered calculus, which also developed into differential calculus and integral calculus. This was no other than Leibniz. More than that, he was one of the first people who invented practical calculating machines that worked on the binary system, true forerunners of the computer. This was somehow described as the mathematical pinball. The credits of first to discover calculus was given to Newton. Leibniz on the other hand was accused of plagiarism.

           In Switzerland, they have the tradition of learning which is related to commerce for they are the biggest and heart of commercial world in the west. There were these two mathematicians who supported and idolized the opus of Leibniz. They were the Bernoulli brothers. They had developed the application of the calculus of the present. This was called the Calculus of Variation. Another famous name in the field of mathematics was Leonhard Euler. There was this centre for ground-breaking research that had become the home of Euler’s mathematical discoveries of topology and analysis. Euler had created the number e and i, also publicized the use the symbol . He had obtained new system of weights and measurement, and had come up with new theory of music. On top of Euler’s breakthrough he had formulated a way to sum up numbers infinitely. It was then become known as the Basel Problem.

          On the eighteenth century, modern mathematicians emerged. Some of those were Joseph Fourier, a mathematician from France that had discovered sound waves that had been the basis of mp3 technologies used today and Carl Freidrich Gauss, a mathematician from Germany. He was entitled as the prince of mathematics. He discovered new pattern of numbers at the early age of 15, and at the age of 19 he discovered a 17-sided figure. The great development of Gauss was the theory of Elliptic function and zeta function. Above from his theories, he made rationalization of the imaginary numbers. A unit of for measuring magnetic induction would be named after Gauss. Another mathematician was Janos Bolyai, he studied imaginary geometry that had further become Hyperbolic geometry. But Nicholas Lobachevsky, a Russian mathematician had the same idea as Bolyai. Bolyai had never had the chance to have credits on his works. Then the discovery of hyperspace in geometry by Bernhard Riemann was brought up. He described geometry as the mathematics with a lot of different space. Riemann’s discovery had give birth to higher dimensional geometry that had changed the perception of how we see things around us.  This mathematical innovation was then become multi-dimensional space that had been the key of having mathematical glasses.

          I realized that the discoveries of the different mathematician from the north had eradicated the boundaries of the space in which we can set our eyes on a 3-dimensional illusion in a 2-dimensional space. With those inventions of Descartes up to Riemann, it had given us the clear perspective on how to see the world we are living.