March 12, 2017 Sunday
A Little More on Raphael Bombelli
Raphael Bombelli (1526 to 1572) – was a mathematician with no
college education.
All the higher education that he received was from an engineer cum
architect by the name of Clementi.
Bombelli was extremely dismayed by the status of prevailing
algebra of his time and decided to clear the water up.
Now this is something.
Imagine an average ape like yourself who has no former
qualification in say a field as complicated as anatomy and says that the field
is all messed up.
Then you decide to write down a complete new book an anatomy to
set it in order.
That is the kind of thing that Bombelli went on to do.
He started to work on it and finally in the year of 1572 that
would prove to his last he published the book L’Algebra.
Since he never himself received formal education, Bombelli wrote
the book in non-technical language such that people with bare minimum education
would be able to grasp the principles of algebra as he was proposing.
Yet even in his simplicity, his work and very meticulous.
Let me give you an example from this remarkable book wherein
Bombelli discusses how to operate on negative numbers:
“Plus times plus makes plus.
Minus times minus makes plus.
Plus times minus makes minus.
Minus times plus makes minus.
Plus 8 times plus 8 makes plus 64.
Minus 5 times minus 6 makes plus 30.
Minus 4 times plus 5 makes minus 20.
Plus 5 times minus 4 makes minus 20.”
Of course, it seems childishly simple now as we were taught these
in our childhood.
Yet these principles of algebra were a novel stuff in the
sixteenth century and before!
As you know better than I do, there is a limit to which you can
keep mathematics as simple as this.
Using his algebraic equations, he introduced the theory of complex
numbers.
Take an equation like the one below:
x3 = ax + b; the solution for x will be a complex
number.
It means that the solution of this equation will have cube root of
one number and square root of some other negative number.
Following this, Bombelli lists out many properties of complex
numbers and later goes on to imaginary numbers.
He very unequivocally states at the very onset that the principles
of arithmetic for the imaginary numbers are vastly different for the real
numbers.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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