Famous Math Inventors

Video Transcript

"So what were some famous math inventors? Hi, I'm Jimmy, I've been teaching college math for 9 years and I'm here to talk a little bit about some of the famous math inventors over history. Now if I was to give you a complete list, we would be here forever so I want to give you a glimpse as to what some folks have done over the course of history in mathematics. Now first I do want to give credit though to some general civilizations because we owe a lot of gratitude to some of these civilizations who've worked with math over the years. It's not just any one person but large groups of people. Some of which include the Greeks, Babylonians and Egyptians. All three of these civilizations worked not just with numbers but they also worked a lot with symbols and a lot of geometric ideas a lot of which still are in place today in and are used very widely over the years. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton, they were some of the forefathers of calculus. Now one thing that a lot of folks may not know is that they both working on calculus around the same time but independently of each other. In other words they didn't know what the other was doing but they were both able to figure out and develop some of the concepts involving not just the science end but also the mathematics end and these two are very important figures in the field of calculus. Two more people which are very important in using mathematics today are Pythagoras who I'm sure you remember the Pythagorean theorem which deals with the right triangles A squared plus B squared equals C squared, leg squared plus leg squared equals hypotenuse squared, that's what the C is. And lastly we're going to talk about briefly John Napier. You may have heard of Napier's bones but he was also famously known for developing logarithms which is a kind of mathematics that helps people calculate things such as the severity of earthquakes, the loudness of sound and carbon dating. Those are some of the areas in which logarithms are used. So I'm Jimmy and this has been a glimpse as to some of our famous math inventors."