Nicolaus Copernicus

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Co-Da/Copernicus-Nicolaus.html

Nicolaus Copernicus was born Feb 14^th 1473 in the town of Torun. His father was a well to-do merchant and his mother was a daughter of a wealthy merchant. He was the youngest child in his family. His father died when he was 10. After this his father’s brother, Lucas Watzelrode became his guardian. Lucas was bishop in the Catholic church. Nicolaus took after his uncle and became involved in the church. Between 1941 and 1942 he completed his matriculation, he also studied mathematical science. In 1497 he continued his studies at three Italian universities, Bologna, Padua and Ferrara. While in Italy he completed his Bi-doctorate in medicine and law.

Copernicus was many things, he was an astronomer, a mathematician, a translator, an artist, a physician, and a scholar. He also “ made maps, attended legislative bodies, held a variety of fiscal posts, acted as a diplomat and as a civil and military inspector, even wrote a treatise on the minting of money by the new Prussian states”.(Morrison.1)

In 1505 he returned to Poland where he was appointed at the Canon in the cathedral of Frauenburg. While there he continued to research astronomy and medical information. In 1513 he started his work on his heliocentric theory. In his early thirties he had documented a developed heliocentric theory of the solar system. His theory spread quickly through out the scientific world. Many astonomers and mathematician flocked to Nicolaus to get more information on this theory.

In 1543 his entire volume of On the Revolutions of Celestial Spheres was published, this is also the year that he passed away.

Here is a passage from Copernicus on his views:

We draw life from the glorious, incandescent sun. It rises daily in the east, until by nightfall it hides behind some horizon, whether land, sea or cloud, diving unseen to reappear at dawn in a different part of the starry background. The glittering stars move as a whole; each year the sun returns to a backdrop of bright points very near the one it left. The moon shows us a disk as wide as the sun's; its changing details are bright but cold, never a hot blaze. In about one month any viewer stationed on Earth can see the moon pass across the entire Zodiac. The outline of the bright, inconstant moon attends strictly to the position of the sun. When the sun lies behind any moon viewer, the moon is full face. When the moon lies right before us and the sun close to the same direction, we have a new moon. That new moon is unseen, for the moon, a cold and lightless rock, glows only under the sun's rays, and is lost to us whenever it is masked within the sun's power of brightening a skyful of blue air.

 I find Copernicus very intriguing because of his deep involvement with the Catholic Church. Even though he was so involved he still had amazing scientific views, which went against what the church believed. I find it interesting that the church would allow him to hold such high positions inside the clergy while still researching his theories. I also wonder what happened after the church discovered his theories?

Copernicus in his prime. (Marginalia). Philip Morrison. American Scientist. 91.2 (March-April 2003)

http://www.famousscientist.org/nicolaus-copernicus/

Creation of Mayan Math

The Mayan civilization made many important achievements in the math world. The created an accurate calendar, a way to represent number, a sign to represent zero and many more.

The first recorded date we have for the Mayans is around 2000BCE in southern Mexico. After a while they started to build burial mounds and step pyramids. “The peak of the Mayan culture was in 900 CE.”(Brown 2).

In 1505 Hernan Cortes left Spain to explore the New World. He left with 11 ships, 506 soldiers and 10 horses. He arrived at the Yucatan Peninsula on Feb 18, 1519. The Mayans that he encountered there offered little hostility towards the explorers. Diego de Landa was 17 years old when he joined Cortes expedition. He is the man who brought the Mayans mathematics to present society. He started out helping the Mayans, spending lots of time throughout their community and protecting them from the Spanish. After a while he started to view them as devil worshipers. He then had all of their idols and writings destroyed. Although later he wrote a book about the Mayans culture.

There were a few documents that survived the destruction ordered by Landan, two of which are the Madrid Codex and the Dresden Codex. Although these artifacts do not say how the Mayans calculated, it does have the results of these calculations, which are incredibly accurate. In the Dresden Codex it has what appears to be a representation of negative numbers. This is supposedly represented by a unit surrounded by a red loop tied with a knot at the top.

The Mayans had a mathematical system that consisted of a cipher system combined with a place value system. This number system was a base 20 system. The thought behind this was that they counted their fingers and toes to a total of twenty. Although this system was not fully a base twenty system, instead of them using a 400’s place there was a 360’s place. The thought behind this is that they wanted to be a close to the days in a year.

There were two basic units that the Mayans used one was a dot, used to represent numbers 1-4, and a bar that was used to represent 5. They combined these two symbols to represent numbers up to twenty. They wrote their number vertically with the lowest denomination on the bottom. The Mayans were the first to come up with the concept of zero. This was commonly represented by a shell.

The most common thought is that the calculations were used to create the calendar. They had two separate calendars; the first one was the “Haab” which was a civil calendar similar to the current day one. The second one was the “Tzolkin” which was the ritual calendar. These two calendars operated separately creating a huge cycle.

http://www.math.wichita.edu/history/topics/num-sys.html#mayan

http:/www.math.utah.edu/~opstall/3010/mayan.pdf