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19th Century Mathematics

The 19th century saw unprecedented growth in mathematics. French mathematics advanced due to Napoleon's emphasis on practical uses, while German mathematics focused more on pure theory under Humboldt. Key figures included Fourier, Gauss, Bolzano, Weierstrass, Cantor, Dedekind, and Poincare. New concepts in analysis, geometry, algebra, logic and set theory emerged. Rigor was increasingly emphasized.

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115 views16 pages

19th Century Mathematics

The 19th century saw unprecedented growth in mathematics. French mathematics advanced due to Napoleon's emphasis on practical uses, while German mathematics focused more on pure theory under Humboldt. Key figures included Fourier, Gauss, Bolzano, Weierstrass, Cantor, Dedekind, and Poincare. New concepts in analysis, geometry, algebra, logic and set theory emerged. Rigor was increasingly emphasized.

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Allyssa Jane Cosico
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© © All Rights Reserved
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19 Century

th

Mathematics
 The 19th Century saw an unprecedented increase in the
breadth and complexity of mathematical concepts. Both
France and Germany were caught up in the age of
revolution which swept Europe in the late 18th Century, but
the two countries treated mathematics quite differently.
 After the French Revolution, Napoleon emphasized the
practical usefulness of mathematics and his reforms and
military ambitions gave French mathematics a big boost,
as exemplified by “the three L’s”, Lagrange, Laplace and
Legendre (see the section on 18th Century Mathematics),
Fourier and Galois.
Joseph Fourier’s study
 ,at the beginning of the 19th Century, of infinite sums in which
the terms are trigonometric functions were another important
advance in mathematical analysis. Periodic functions that can
be expressed as the sum of an infinite series of sines and
cosines are known today as Fourier Series, and they are still
powerful tools in pure and applied mathematics. Fourier
(following Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange and others) also
contributed towards defining exactly what is meant by a
function, although the definition that is found in texts today –
defining it in terms of a correspondence between elements of
the domain and the range – is usually attributed to the 19th
Century German mathematician Peter Dirichlet.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
 Germany, on the other hand, under the influence of the great
educationalist Wilhelm von Humboldt, took a rather different
approach, supporting pure mathematics for its own sake,
detached from the demands of the state and military. It was in this
environment that the young German prodigy Carl Friedrich Gauss
, sometimes called the “Prince of Mathematics”, received his
education at the prestigious University of Göttingen. Some of 
Gauss’ ideas were a hundred years ahead of their time, and
touched on many different parts of the mathematical world,
including geometry, number theory, calculus, algebra and
probability. He is widely regarded as one of the three greatest
mathematicians of all times, along with Archimedes and Newton.
Non-Euclidean Geometry
Later in life, Gauss also claimed to have
investigated a kind of non-Euclidean
geometry using curved space but,
unwilling to court controversy, he
decided not to pursue or publish any of
these avant-garde ideas. This left the
field open for János Bolyai and Nikolai
Lobachevsky (respectively, a
Hungarian and a Russian) who both
independently explored the potential of
hyperbolic geometry and curved
spaces.
 George Boole
 In the mid-19th Century, the British mathematician 
George Boole devised an algebra (now called Boolean
algebra or Boolean logic), in which the only operators
were AND, OR and NOT, and which could be applied to
the solution of logical problems and mathematical
functions. He also described a kind of binary system
which used just two objects, “on” and “off” (or “true”
and “false”, 0 and 1, etc), in which, famously, 1 + 1 = 1.
Boolean algebra was the starting point of modern
mathematical logic and ultimately led to the
development of computer science.
 Throughout the 19th Century, mathematics in general became ever
more complex and abstract. But it also saw a re-visiting of some older
methods and an emphasis on mathematical rigour. In the first decades of
the century, the Bohemian priest Bernhard Bolzano was one of the
earliest mathematicians to begin instilling rigour into mathematical
analysis, as well as giving the first purely analytic proof of both the
fundamental theorem of algebra and the intermediate value theorem,
and early consideration of sets (collections of objects defined by a
common property, such as “all the numbers greater than 7” or “all right
triangles“, etc). When the German mathematician Karl Weierstrass
discovered the theoretical existence of a continuous function having no
derivative (in other words, a continuous curve possessing no tangent at
any of its points), he saw the need for a rigorous “arithmetization” of
calculus, from which all the basic concepts of analysis could be derived.
George Cantor

 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 which has since become the
common language of nearly all mathematics. In
the face of fierce resistance from most of his
contemporaries and his own battle against mental
illness, Cantor explored new mathematical worlds
where there were many different infinities, some
of which were larger than others.
 Cantor’s work on set theory was extended by another German,
Richard Dedekind, who defined concepts such as similar sets and
infinite sets. Dedekind also came up with the notion, now called a
Dedekind cut which is now a standard definition of the real
numbers. He showed that any irrational number divides the
rational numbers into two classes or sets, the upper class being
strictly greater than all the members of the other lower class.
Thus, every location on the number line continuum contains
either a rational or an irrational number, with no empty locations,
gaps or discontinuities. In 1881, the Englishman John Venn
introduced his “Venn diagrams” which become useful and
ubiquitous tools in set theory.
 Henri Poincaré came to prominence in the latter part of the 19th
Century with at least a partial solution to the “three body problem”,
a deceptively simple problem which had stubbornly resisted
resolution since the time of Newton, over two hundred years earlier.
Although his solution actually proved to be erroneous, its
implications led to the early intimations of what would later become
known as chaos theory. In between his important work in theoretical
physics, he also greatly extended the theory of mathematical
topology, leaving behind a knotty problem known as the Poincaré
conjecture which remined unsolve. He is sometimes referred to as
the “Last Univeralist” as he was perhaps the last mathematician
able to shine in almost all of the various aspects of what had become
by now a huge, encyclopedic and incredibly complex subject.
BERNOULLI BROTHERS – THE MATH
FAMILY
The Bernoulli family
 Unusually in the history of mathematics, a single family,
the Bernoulli’s, produced half a dozen outstanding
mathematicians over a couple of generations at the end of
the 17th and start of the 18th Century.
 The Bernoulli family was a prosperous family of traders and
scholars from the free city of Basel in Switzerland, which at
that time was the great commercial hub of central
Europe.The brothers, Jacob and Johann Bernoulli, however,
flouted their father’s wishes for them to take over the family
spice business or to enter respectable professions like
medicine or the ministry, and began studying mathematics
together.
Brachistochrone Problem
The Art of Conjecture: Trials, Distribution, Numbers

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