Some Important Historical Names, Dates,* and Events
MATHEMATICAL
GENERAL
Early Beginnings (Before the Sixth Century B.C.)
B.C.
30,000
8000
2500
1900
1850
1650
B.C.
Notched wolf bone
Ishango bone
Table tablets from Nippur
Plimpton 322
Moscow Papyrus
Rhind Papyrus
3300
2600
2100
1500
1200
700
Menes unites Egypt
Great Pyramid at Gizeh
Code of Hammurabi
Phoenician alphabet
Trojan War
Homer: The Odyssey
Classical Period (Sixth Century B.C. to Fifth Century)
B.C.
A.D.
622-547
585-500
ca. 470
460-380
ca. 420
408-355
323-285
287-212
262-190
ca. 240
ca. 230
ca. 75
ca. 100
85-160
ca. 250
ca. 260
ca. 300
365-395
/ d. 415
410-485
Thales of Miletus
Pythagoras of Samos
Theodorus of Cyrene
Hippocrates of Chios
Hippias of Elis
Euxodus of Cnidos
Euclid
Archimedes
Apollonius of Perga
Nicomedes
Eratosthenes of Cyrene
Heron of Alexandria
Nicomachus of Gerasa
Claudius Ptolemy
Diophantus
Liu Hui
Pappus of Alexandria
Theon of Alexandria
Hypatia
Proclus
*Most dates before 600 B.C. are only approximate.
B.C.
A.D.
558-486
485-430
480
469-399
431
388
356-323
ca. 370
331
213
212
195
106-43
44
27
100
272-337
286
324
455
Darius the Great
Herodotus
Battle of Thermopylae
Socrates
Peloponnesian War
Plato founds Academy
Alexander the Great
Eudemus of Rhodes
Foundation of Alexandria
Books burned in China
Fall of Syracuse to Romans
Rosetta Stone engraved
Cicero
Assassination of Caesar
Beginning of Roman Empire
Paper made in China
Constantine the Great
Division of the Empire
Constantinople founded
Vandals sack Rome
MATHEMATICAL
GENERAL
Medieval and Renaissance Periods (Sixth Century to Sixteenth Century)
ca. 475-524
Boethius
636
ca. 476-550
ca. 625
ca. 826-901
735-804
Aryabhata
Brahmagupta
Thabit-ibn-Korra
Alcuin of York
641
732
787
800
ca. 850-930
ca. 1050-1130
1114-1185
1114-1187
ca. 1120
ca. 1175-1250
1436-1476
1445-1514
1473-1543
1494-1575
1495-1552
1500-1557
1501-1576
1510-1558
1522-1565
1526-1572
1540-1603
1546-1601
1548-1626
1550-1617
1564-1642
1571-1630
Abu Kamil
Omar Khayyam
Bhaskara
Gerard of Cremona
Adelhard of Bath
Leonardo of Pisa
Regiomontanus
Luca Pacioli
Nicolas Copernicus
Francesco Maurolico
Peter Apian
Niccolo Tartaglia
Girolamo Cardan
Robert Recorde
Ludovico Ferrari
Raphael Bombelli
Francois Vieta
Tycho Brache
Pietro Cataldi
John Napier
Galileo Galilei
Johannes Kepler
ca. 1000
1066
1096-1099
1200
1209
1215
1258
1271-1295
1293
1337-1453
1348
1440
1447
1451
1453
1472-1514
1478
1492
1513
1517
1564-1616
1588
Death of the Prophet
Mohammed
Library at Alexandria burned
Arabs defeated at Tours
Start of the Viking Invasions
Charlemagne crowned
Emperor
Leif Eriksson sails to America
Battle of Hastings
The First Crusade
University of Paris chartered
Cambridge University founded
Magna Carta signed
Oxford University founded
Travels of Marco Polo
Paper produced in Bologna
Hundred Years' War
Black Death in Europe
Invention of Printing
Founding of Vatican Library
Death of Joan of Arc
Turks capture Constantinople
Leonardo da Vinci
Treviso Arithmetic
Columbus reaches West Indies
Balboa discovers the Pacific
Luther's 95 Theses
William Shakespeare
Defeat of Spanish Armada
MATHEMATICAL
GENERAL
Early Modern Period (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)
1588-1648
1591-1661
1596-1650
1601-1665
1608-1647
Marin Mersenne
G<§rard Desargues
Ren6 Descartes
Pierre de Fermat
Evangelista Torricelli
1607
1608
1611
1618-1648
1619
1616-1703
1623-1662
1629-1695
1630-1677
1635-1703
1642-1727
1646-1716
John Wallis
Blaise Pascal
Christiaan Huygens
Isaac Barrow
Robert Hooke
Isaac Newton
Gottfried Leibniz
1620
1632-1723
1636
1642-1649
1658
1662
1663
1654-1705
1656-1742
1661-1704
1667-1733
1667-1748
1667-1754
1685-1731
1690-1764
1707-1783
1717-1783
1718-1799
1728-1777
1736-1813
1749-1827
1752-1833
1768-1830
1777-1855
1781-1848
James Bernoulli
Edmond Halley
Marquis de 1'Hospital
Girolamo Saccheri
John Bernoulli
Abraham DeMoivre
Brook Taylor
Christian Goldbach
Leonhard Euler
Jean le Rond d'Alembert
Maria Agnesi
Johann Lambert
Joseph Louis Lagrange
Pierre Simon Laplace
Adrien-Marie Legendre
Joseph Fourier
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Bernhard Bolzano
1666
1682
1683
1687
1694-1778
1712-1786
1737-1794
1751
1769
1769-1821
1770-1827
1776-1783
1789
1789
1798
1798
1798
1799
Jamestown founded
Telescope invented
King James Bible
Thirty Years' War
Savilian Professorship
(Oxford)
Landing of Pilgrims
Christopher Wren
Harvard College founded
English Civil War
Death of Cromwell
Royal Society of London
Lucasian Professorship
(Cambridge)
Academic des Sciences
Acta Eruditorum
Turks defeated at Vienna
Newton's Principia
Voltaire
Frederick the Great
Edward Gibbon
Diderot's Encyclopedic
James Watt's steam engine
Napoleon Bonaparte
Ludwig van Beethoven
American Revolution
Washington President
French Revolution
Eli Whitney's cotton gin
Ecole Normale founded
Bonaparte in Egypt
Rosetta Stone
MATHEMATICAL
GENERAL
Modern Period (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries)
1789-1857
1793-1856
1802-1829
1802-1860
1804-1851
1805-1865
1805-1859
1809-1882
1810-1893
1811-1832
1814-1897
1815-1897
1821-1895
1823-1891
Augustine Louis Cauchy
Nicolai Lobachevsky
Niels Henrik Abel
John Bolyai
Carl Gustav Jacobi
William Rowan Hamilton
P. G. Lejune Dirichlet
Joseph Liouville
Ernst Eduard Kummer
Evariste Galois
James Joseph Sylvester
Karl Weierstrass
Arthur Cayley
Leopold Kronecker
1801
1809-1882
1812-1814
1812-1870
1818-1883
1820-1910
1823
1825
1826
1836
1846
1858
1861-1865
1869
1826-1866
1831-1916
1845-1918
Bernhard Riemann
Richard Dedekind
Georg Cantor
1871
1876
1878
1848-1925
1849-1925
Gottlob Frege
Felix Klein
1879
1894
1850-1891
1852-1939
1858-1932
1862-1943
1868-1942
1872-1970
1877-1947
1882-1966
1882-1935
1887-1920
1903-1957
1906-1978
Sonya Kovalesky
Ferdinand Lindemann
Giuseppe Peano
David Hilbert
Felix Hausdorff
Bertrand Russell
Godfrey Harold Hardy
L. E. J. Brouwer
Amalie Emmy Noether
Srinivasa Ramanujan
John von Neumann
Kurt Godel
1895
1903
1914
1914-1918
1917
1927
1929
1933
1939-1945
1963
1969
1989
Ceres discovered
Charles Darwin
War of 1812
Charles Dickens
Karl Marx
Florence Nightingale
Monroe Doctrine
Erie Canal opens
Crelle's Journal
First telegraph
Discovery of Neptune
Transatlantic cable
American Civil War
American transcontinental
railway
German empire
Bell's telephone
American Journal of
Mathematics
Edison's electric lamp
American Mathematical
Society
Discovery of X-rays
First powered air flight
Completion of Panama Canal
First World War
Bolshevik Revolution
Lindberg's flight to Paris
The Great Depression
Hitler becomes Chancellor
Second World War
Kennedy Assassinated
Landing on the moon
Berlin Wall dismantled