Brook Taylor
Born: August 18, 1685; Edmonton, Middlesex, England.
Died: December 29, 1731; Somerset House, London, England.
Brook Taylor was born into a fairly wealthy family on the fringes of nobility. His father, John Taylor, was the son of Nathaniel Taylor – a member of Oliver Cromwell’s Assembly. His mother, Olivia Tempest, was the daughter of Sir John Tempest.
Taylor was brought up in a household where his father ruled as a strict disciplinarian, yet he was a man of culture with interests in painting and music. Therefore, Taylor grew up not only to be an accomplished musician and painter, but he applied his mathematical skills to both these areas later in his life.
Since Taylor’s family was well off, they could afford to have private tutors for their son, and in fact this home education was all that he enjoyed before entering St. John’s College – Cambridge on April 3, 1703. By this time he had a good grounding in classics and mathematics. At Cambridge, Taylor became highly involved with mathematics. He graduated with an L.L.B in 1709, but by this time he had already written his first important mathematics paper in 1708. (It was not published until 1714)
In 1712, Taylor was elected to the Royal Society. It was an election based more on the expertise, which Machin, Keill, and others knew that Taylor had, rather than on his published results. For example, Taylor wrote to Machin in 1712 providing a solution to a problem concerning Kepler’s second law of planetary motion. Also in 1712, Taylor was appointed to the committee set up to adjudicate on whether the claim of Newton or of Leibniz to have invented the calculus was correct.
The year 1714 also marks the time in which Taylor was elected Secretary to the Royal Society. It was a position that Taylor held from January 14 of that year until October 21, 1718 when he resigned, partly for health reasons and his lack of interest in the rather demanding position. That time period marks what must be his most mathematically productive time. Two books, which appeared in 1715, Methodus incrementorum directa et inversa and Linear Perspective are extremely important in the history of mathematics.
Taylor made several visits to France. These were made partly for health reasons and partly to visit friends he had made there. He met Pierre Remond de Montmort and corresponded with him on various mathematical topics after his return.
In the beginning of the story we see that Taylor is an average teenage girl living with a single mother. She says, “But I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble” (3). She was called “Missy” for a lot of her childhood but when she was three she said, “I stamped my foot and told my mother not to call me Marietta but Miss Marietta” (2). From Taylor’s childhood I find that she had a sense of personal pride and could defend herself. These really are great attributes and we really see these attributes grow more and mature throughout the story.
In spite of the fact that Faith Evans carved out a recording career in her own right, her name will forever remain linked in the minds of many to her late husband the Notorious B.I.G. Evans was an active session singer and songwriter before signing her own solo deal and marrying Biggie, and while she never matched the level of his stardom, she continued to come into her own as a vocalist in the years after his untimely death.
He stated in an interview He had always been good at math and somewhat interested in it, but geometry really excited him. He credited his first two geometry teachers for influencing him. “Mr. Huck encouraged some of us to try to solve problems in a mathematics magazine. I solved some of them and he mailed my solutions in and a few times my name appeared in the magazine.” While in school Blackwell did not care for algebra and trigonometry. He stated to biographies the most interesting thing he remembered from calculus was Newton's method for solving equations. That was the only thing in calculus I really liked. The rest of it looked like stuff that was useful for engineers in finding moments of inertia and volumes and such. In his junior year of college, he took an elementary analysis course and really fell in love with mathematics. It became clear that it was not simply a few things that interested him but that the whole subject was just beautiful. Four years after he was granted an
...eat majority of his life on a farm in the country, I live and have always lived in the city. Zachary Taylor has inspired me in my school life because he didn’t have a formal education, and also he inspired me in my personal life to be a strong and independent person.
Ball, Rouse. “Sir Isaac Newton.” A Short Account of the History of Mathematics. 4th ed. Print.
No other scholar has affected more fields of learning than Blaise Pascal. Born in 1623 in Clermont, France, he was born into a family of respected mathematicians. Being the childhood prodigy that he was, he came up with a theory at the age of three that was Euclid’s book on the sum of the interior of triangles. At the age of sixteen, he was brought by his father Etienne to discuss about math with the greatest minds at the time. He spent his life working with math but also came up with a plethora of new discoveries in the physical sciences, religion, computers, and in math. He died at the ripe age of thirty nine in 1662(). Blaise Pascal has contributed to the fields of mathematics, physical science and computers in countless ways.
Furthermore, during 1619 he invented analytic geometry which was a method of solving geometric problems and algebraic geometrically problems. After, Rene worked on his method of Discourse of Mindand Rules for the Directions of th...
Born in the Netherlands, Daniel Bernoulli was one of the most well-known Bernoulli mathematicians. He contributed plenty to mathematics and advanced it, ahead of its time. His father, Johann, made him study medicine at first, as there was little money in mathematics, but eventually, Johann gave in and tutored Daniel in mathematics. Johann treated his son’s desire to lea...
In 1793 he moved to Manchester, this is where he would remain the rest of his life. Dalton was influenced greatly by the mathematician John Gough. Dalton, while in Manchester, became the teacher of math and philosophy at a college. He taught there until 1799. Dalton became a chemist and physicist after his teaching jobs.
Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Vol. 7, 1718-1727. Edited by A. Rupert Hall and Laura Tilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Society, 1977.
Isaac was reunited with his mom when he was twelve years old; she had three small children from her second husband who was deceased. By that time, he was enrolled at King’s School in Grantham where he was first introduced to chemistry (Bio). His mother, who wanted her son to be like his father, pulled Isaac out of school to make him a farmer but he failed because he found farming to be boring. He returned to school and finished basic education. Then his uncle, a professor got him enrolled at Cambridge University. During his first three years, he was taught standard curriculum, but was more fascinated with advanced science and chemistry (Bio). After being there three years, in October 1665, a plague epidemic forced Cambridge University to close and Isaac returned home to Woolsthorpe. During this time is when he did research and conceived the method of infinitesimal calculus, and set foundations for his theory of light and color. It is also believed that during...
Taylor’s grandmother was a famous opera singer. Her name was Marjorie Finaly. She was Taylor’s inspiration for music. She would sing during family parties. She was the center of attention. She performed in many different countries. She performed in many operas and musicals. Taylor could memor...
Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest physicist and mathematicians of all time. He was born in England on December 25, 1642 on Christmas. He died at the age of eighty four on March 20, 1727. Newton was never married and never had any children. Though he did have three siblings from his mother’s second marriage. Some of Newton’s achievements in physics and mathematics are; Newton’s law of universal gravitation, Newton’s three laws of motion, calculus, refraction of light, reflecting telescope, Newton’s law of cooling, coins, and the binomial theorem. I will be talking about all of these in this paper over Sir Isaac Newton along with different parts of his personal life along the way.
Burton, D. (2011). The History of Mathematics: An Introduction. (Seventh Ed.) New York, NY. McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
The 17th Century saw Napier, Briggs and others greatly extend the power of mathematics as a calculator science with his discovery of logarithms. Cavalieri made progress towards the calculus with his infinitesimal methods and Descartes added the power of algebraic methods to geometry. Euclid, who lived around 300 BC in Alexandria, first stated his five postulates in his book The Elements that forms the base for all of his later Abu Abd-Allah ibn Musa al’Khwarizmi, was born abo...