A timeline of mathematics and theoretical physics

The Official String Theory Web Site:--> History --> Timeline (before 1800 / 1800-1899 / 1900 until today)

-1500	Babylonians establish the metric of flat 2-dimensional space by observation, in their efforts to keep track of land for legal and economic purposes.
-518	Pythagoras, a Greek educated by mystics in Egypt and Babylon, founds community of men and women calling themselves mathematikoi, in southern Italy. They believe that reality is in essence mathematical. Pythagoras noted that vibrating lyre strings with harmonious notes have lengths that are proportional by a whole number. The Pythagorean theorem proves by reasoning what the Babylonians figured out by measurement 1000 years earlier.
-387	Plato, after traveling to Italy and learning about the Pythagoreans, founds his Academy in Athens, and continues to develop the idea that reality must be expressible in mathematical terms. But Athens at that time has developed a notoriously misogynist culture. Unlike his role model Pythagoras, whose school developed many women mathematikoi, Plato does not allow women to participate.
-300	Euclid of Alexandria, a gifted teacher, produces Elements, one of the top mathematics textbooks of recorded history, which organizes the existing Mediterranean understanding of geometry into a coherent logical framework.
-225	Ionian mathematician Apollonius writes Conics, and introduces the terms ellipse, parabola and hyperbola to describe conic sections.
-140	Nicaean mathematician and astronomer Hipparchus develops what will be known as trigonometry.
150	The Almagest by Alexandrian astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy asserts that the Sun and planets orbit around the Earth in perfect circles. Ptolemy's work is so influential that will become official church doctrine when the Christians later come to rule Europe.
415	As a glorious 2000 years of ancient Mediterranean mathematics and science comes to a close, Hypatia of Alexandria, a renowned teacher, mathematician, astronomer, and priestess of Isis, is kidnapped from a public religious procession and brutally murdered by a mob of angry Christian monks.
628	Hindu mathematician-astronomer Brahmagupta writes Brahma- sphuta- siddhanta (The Opening of the Universe). Hindu mathematicians develop numerals and start investigating number theory.
830	The spread of Islam leads to the spread of written Arabic language. As ancient Greek and Hindu works are translated into Arabic, a culture of mathematics and astronomy develops. The peak of this cultural flowering is represented by Arabic mathematician Al-Khworizmi, working at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, who develops what will be known as algebra in his work Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala.
1070	Iranian poet, mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyam begins his Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, classifying cubic equations that could be solved by conic sections. Khayyam was such a brilliant poet that history has nearly forgotten that he was also a brilliant scientist and mathematician. The moving finger writes...
1120	Adelard of Bath translates works of Euclid and Al-Khworizmi into Latin and introduces them to European scholars.
1482	Euclid's Elements is published using the revolutionary new technology of the printing press, leading to a revolution in education and scholarship as information becomes more difficult for authorities to control.
1543	Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres) asserting that the Earth and planets revolve about the Sun. The Catholic Church has accorded an official holy status to Ptolemy's geocentric Universe. Copernicus avoids prosecution as a heretic by waiting until the end of his own life to publish his controversial claims.
1589	Pisa University mathematics instructor Galileo Galilei studies the motion of objects and begins a book De Motu (On Motion) which he never finishes.
1602	Galileo observes that the period of a swinging pendulum is independent of the amplitude of the swing.
1609	Johannes Kepler claims in the journal Astronomia Nova that the orbit of Mars is an ellipse with the Sun at one focus, and sweeps out equal areas in equal time. He will later generalize these into his famous Three Laws of Planetary Motion.
1609	Galileo makes his first telescope. His observations of the moon show that it looks like a very large lumpy rock, not a divinely smooth and perfect shining Platonic heavenly orb. This discovery has enormously distressing cultural reverberations for Western culture and religion.
1614	Scottish theologian John Napier, who does mathematics as a hobby, publishes his discovery of the logarithm in his work Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio.
1615	Kepler's mother, Frau Katharina Kepler, is accused of witchcraft by a local prostitute. European witch hunting was at its peak during Kepler's career, and witch hunting was supported by all levels of society, including secular officials and intellectuals in universities. Kepler spends the next several years making legal appeals and hiding his mother from legal authorities seeking to torture her into confessing to witchcraft. Examining an accused witch ad torturam was a standard court procedure during this era.
1620	Under court order, Kepler's mother is kidnapped in the middle of the night from her daughter's home and taken to prison. Kepler spends the next year appealing to the duke of Württemberg to prevent his imprisoned mother from being examined ad torturam.
1621	On September 28, Katharina Kepler is taken from her prison cell into the torture room, shown the instruments of torture and ordered to confess. She replies "Do with me what you want. Even if you were to pull one vein after another out of my body, I would have nothing to admit," and says the Lord's Prayer. She is taken back to prison. She is freed on October 4 upon order of the duke, who rules that her refusal to confess under threat of torture proves her innocence. He also orders her accusers to pay the cost of her trial and imprisonment.
1622	After having spent most of the last seven years under the legal threat of imminent torture, Katharina Kepler dies on April 13, still being threatened with violence from those who insist she is a witch.
1624	Pope Urban VIII promises Galileo that he is allowed write about Copernican heliocentrism if he treats it as an abstract proposition.
1628	Kepler uses Napier's logarithms to compute a set of astronomical tables, the Rudolphine Tables, whose accuracy is so impressive that it leads to the quiet acceptance of the heliocentric solar system by everyone in the shipping industry.
1629	Basque mathematician Pierre de Fermat, the founder of modern number theory, begins his brilliant career by reconstructing the work of Apollonius on conic sections . Fermat and Descartes pioneer the application of algebraic methods to solving problems in geometry.
1632	Galileo publishes Dialogue concerning the two greatest world systems, which argues convincingly for the Copernican view that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun.
1633	The Inquisition calls Galieo to Rome to answer charges of heresy against the Catholic Church.
1637	Descartes publishes his revolutionary Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method) containing three essays on the use of reason to search for the truth. In the third essay Descartes describes analytic geometry, and uses the letters (x,y,z) for the coordinate system that will later bear his name.
1642	Galileo dies at his villa in Florence, still under house arrest from charges of heresy.
1663	Cambridge mathematician Isaac Barrow delivers lectures on modern methods of computing tangents that inspire his student Isaac Newton towards developing calculus
1665	Newton's "miraculous years" in math and physics, when he discovers the derivative, which he sees as a ratio of velocities called fluxions, and the integral, which he sees as a fluent of the fluxions. Newton shows that the fluent and fluxion are inversely related, a result now called the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Newton also develops his ideas on optics and gravitation. He tries to publish his work in 1671, but the publisher goes bankrupt.
1683	Jacob Bernoulli, who studied mathematics and astronomy against the wishes of his career-minded parents, teaches Newtonian mechanics at the University of Basel, and turns mathematical physics into a family business.
1684	Leibniz publishes the beginning of his work on differential and integral calculus. He discovers the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in his own way. Leibniz originates most of the current calculus notation including the integral sign. He portrays an integral as a sum of infinitesimals, a concept rejected by Newton.
1687	Newton publishes Principia Mechanica after Edmund Halley convinces Newton to write up his alleged proof that an inverse square force law leads to elliptical orbits. Newton's Laws of Motion and Law of Gravitation lead to the development of theoretical physics itself. This event marks a permanent change in the relationship between human beings and the Universe.
1693	Newton has a nervous breakdown after his close companion Fatio De Duillier becomes ill and has to return to Switzerland.
1696	Brachistochrone problem solved by Jacob and Johann Bernoulli, an early result in the calculus of variations.
1712	Thanks to a campaign waged by Newton, a commission appointed by Royal Society of London President Isaac Newton rules that Leibniz is guilty of plagiarism against Newton in the discovery of calculus. English mathematics and theoretical physics go into decline because those loyal to Newton are hesitant to adopt Leibniz' infinitesimal and his clean, intuitively appealing notation.
1736	Leonhard Euler begins the field of topology when he publishes his solution of the Konigsberg Bridge problem.
1738	Hydrodynamics by Daniel Bernoulli
1748	The multitalented Euler begins the fields of mathematical analysis and analytical mechanics with Introductio in analysin infinitorum. Euler introduces the formula e^ix = cos x + i sin x
1758	Joseph-Louis Lagrange finds the complete general solution to the Newtonian equations of motion for a vibrating string, which explains the harmonic relations observed by Pythagoras 22 centuries ago.
1770	Hyperbolic trigonometry -- cosh, sinh -- is developed.
1772	Henry Cavendish, a wealthy but paranoid recluse, discovers that the electrostatic force is described by an inverse square law similar to gravity, but doesn't tell anyone in the science community.
1788	Lagrange further develops the analytical mechanics of Euler when he publishes Mécanique Analytique, revealing Newtonian mechanics to be a rich field of exploration for mathematicians.
1789	Aristocrat Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, hiding from the French Revolution after the storming of the Bastille, shows that the electrostatic force between electric charges was very well described by an inverse square law, in full analogy with Newtonian gravity. This becomes known as Coulomb's Law, even though Henry Cavendish was the first one to demonstrate it.
1793	Lagrange is arrested during the Reign of Terror, but is rescued by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry. Unfortunately, Lavoisier's career in chemistry is ended when he is taken to meet Madame Guillotine on May 8, 1794.
1799	Pierre-Simon Laplace publishes his work Traité du Mécanique Céleste (Treatise on Celestial Mechanics) using differential equations to solve problems in planetary motion and fluid flow.
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