Denmarc Riel C.

Anay MATH406 EDA: History of Mathematics October 11, 2010

SYNOPSIS ON 19th CENTURY MATHEMATICS It is believed that the modern period of mathematics began at the 19 th century. This century witnessed tremendous change in mathematics with increased

specialization and new theories of algebra and number theory. The entire scope of mathematics was enriched by the discovery of controversial areas of study such as non-Euclidean geometries and transfinite set theory. One of the mathematicians who have the great and dominant contribution is Carl Friedrich Gauss. During this century, mathematics is held to be increasingly abstract. We all know that Gauss has also many great contributions to science, things were set aside and he did his works primarily on functions of complex variables, in geometry and convergence of series. He gave his first satisfactory proofs of fundamental theorem of algebra and of the quadratic reciprocity law. Moreover, in the area of arithmetic, number theory and algebra, Gauss led the way. As mentioned above, he established the modern theory of numbers gave the first clear exposition of complex numbers and investigated the functions of complex variables. The concept of number was further extended by Hamilton, whose theory of quarternions provided the first example of a noncumulative algebra. This century saw the development of the two forms of non-Euclidean geometry, where the parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry no longer holds. The Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky and his rival, the Hungarian

mathematician Janos Bolyai, independently defined and studied hyperbolic geometry, where uniqueness of parallels no longer holds. In this geometry the sums of angles in a triangle add up to less than 180. Elliptic geometry was developed later in the 19th

century by the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann; here no parallel can be found and the angles in a triangle add up to more than 180. Riemann also developed Riemannian geometry, which unifies and vastly generalizes the three types of geometry, and he defined the concept of a manifold, which generalize the ideas of curves and surfaces. The 19th century saw the beginning of a great deal of abstract algebra. Hermann Grassmann in Germany gave a first version of vector spaces, William Rowan Hamilton in Ireland developed noncommutative algebra. The British mathematician George Boole devised an algebra that soon evolved into what is now called Boolean algebra, in which the only numbers were 0 and 1 and in which, 1 + 1 = 1. Boolean algebra is the starting point of mathematical logic and has important applications in computer science. Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bernhard Riemann, and Karl Weierstrass reformulated the calculus in a more rigorous fashion. In the later 19th century, Georg Cantor established the first foundations of set theory, which enabled the rigorous treatment of the notion of infinity and has become the common language of nearly all mathematics. Lastly, these developments continued with the group theory of Lie in the late 19th century and reached full expression I the wide scope of modern algebra.