Timeline
From Math111
emphasis is on publication dates
(-1850) Egyptian Moscow papyrus
(-1800) Babylonian Plimpton 322 (Pythagorean triples)
(-1700) Babylonian YBC 7289 (square root of 2)
(-1650) Egyptian Rhind papyrus
...
(-800) Vedic era in India: Hindu scriptural texts like Shatapatha Brahmana contain math
(-6th c.) intellectual flowering in China (age of Confucius and technological growth) sees academies of scholars founded
...
(-540) Pythagoras establishes school in Croton
(-450) Zeno's paradoxes
(-4th c.) Aristotle responds to Zeno, codifies logical forms
(-360) Eudoxus' theory of proportions, exhaustion
(-300) Euclid's Elements
(+140-415) heydey of Alexandria: Ptolemy, Diophantus, Pappus, Proclus, Hypatia
...
(0) during Han dynasty, Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art problems include solving simultaneous linear equations
(190) Abacus mentioned in work of Xu Yue
(3rd c) Chinese remainder theorem, early version
...
(628) Brahmagupta writes on number theory and rules for zero
...
(830) House of Wisdom in Baghdad: Al-Khwarizmi writes on quadratic equation in "rhetorical algebra"
(1100) Khayyam works on the cubic equation and on Euclid's fifth postulate
...
(1200) rough estimate: birth of the European university
(1202) Fibonacci's Liber Abaci popularizes zero in Europe
(1350) Oresme shows harmonic series diverges
(15th c.) Indian mathematicians write about formula amounting to power series for arctan
(1482) first printed Euclid
...
(1550) cubic dispute (Cardano-Tartaglia)
(1572) Bombelli works out formal algebra of complex numbers
(1591) Viete breakthrough: letters for unknowns
...
(1637) Descartes' La Geometrie (appendix to a mainly philosophical text) introduces coordinate geometry
(1637) Fermat states "Fermat's Last Theorem" in the margin of his copy of Diophantus
(1655) Wallis' Arithmetica Infinitorum derives testable formulas through abstraction/analogy, invites scorn of Hobbes
(1665-1716) Newton-Leibniz calculus controversy
(1696) L'Hospital's rule (bought from Johann Bernoulli)
...
(1733) Saccheri dies; Euclides Vindicatus published posthumously
(1734) Bishop Berkeley attacks "infidel mathematician" in The Analyst, argues infinitesimals require a religion-like faith
(1748) Euler's major work on infinite series
(1796) Legendre conjectures Prime Number Theorem (PNT)
...
(1807) Gauss called to Gottingen; affirms "citizenship rights" of complex numbers and revolutionizes all fields of math, while publishing little (pauca sed matura)
(1820s) multiple discoveries in non-Euclidean geometry (Lobachevsky, Bolyai, earlier by Gauss)
(1826) Crelle's journal established: first modern math journal
(1830) Galois' major papers deal with solvability by radicals and solutions of higher-degree polynomials
(1859) Riemann hypothesizes "Riemann hypothesis"
(1872) Weierstrass's continuous nowhere differentiable function
(1872) Klein's Erlangen program: use symmetry (groups) to study geometry
(1871) Dedekind kickstarts algebraic number theory, drawing on exploratory work of Dirichlet, Kummer, Eisenstein, Hermite, Kronecker
(1877-78) math hits America: Sylvester becomes first math prof at JHU, founds American Journal of Mathematics
(1882-1904) Poincare's papers modernize hyperbolic geometry, develop topology; "Poincare conjecture"
(1874-97) Cantor publishes a series of papers developing theory of sets and the infinite
(1896) PNT proved by Hadamard, de la Vallee Poussin
...
(1900) Hilbert proposes problem list at Paris ICM
(1902) Frege receives letter from Russell (Russell's paradox) undermining his Grundgesetz while in press
(1910) Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica
(1914-18) Ramanujan in Cambridge
(1918) Hausdorff on dimension; birth of fractals
(1931) Godel's incompleteness theorem
(1933) Jews expelled from German universities
(1935) Noether dies; Bourbaki formed
(1936) first Fields Medals awarded
(1937) E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics
(1949) Erdos-Selberg elementary proof of PNT
(1963) Cohen resolves continuum hypothesis
(1975) Mandelbrot coins "fractal"
(1993) Wiles announces proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
...
(2000) Clay Mathematics Institute offers a million dollars each for seven "Millenium Problems," including the Riemann Hypothesis and the Poincare Conjecture
(2006) Perelman's 2002 preprints are by now considered a proof of the Geometrization Theorem, and with it the Poincare Conjecture; Perelman rejects Fields Medal; million dollars pending
