Simon Stevin

Simon Stevin

Simon Stevin

(1548 - 1620) was a Flemish mathematician and engineer. He was active in a great many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical. He also translated various mathematical terms into Dutch, making it one of the few European

languages

in which the word for mathematics, “wiskunde”, was not derived from Greek (via Latin).

Stevin was born in Bruges, Flanders (now Belgium) in the year 1548 by Antheunis Stevin and Cathelyne van der Poort. Very little has been recorded about his life. Even the exact date of birth and the date and place of his death (The Hague or Leiden) are uncertain. It is known that he left a widow with two

children

; and one or two hints scattered throughout his works inform us that he began life as a merchant’s clerk in Antwerp, that he travelled in Poland, Denmark and other parts of northern Europe. After his travels, he became advisor and teacher of Prince Maurice of Nassau, who asked his advice on many occasions, and made him a public officer, at first director of the so-called “waterstaet” (the government authority for public works), and later quartermaster-general.

His claims to fame are varied, encompassing physics, optics, astronomy, engineering, music theory, accounting and mathematics.

Stevin was the first to show how to model

regular

and semiregular polyhedra by delineating their frames in a plane. Stevin also distinguished stable from

unstable

equilibria. He proved the law of the equilibrium on an inclined plane, using an ingenious and intuitive diagram showing a rope containing evenly spaced beads draped over an inclined plane. The diagram is said to have been inscribed on his tombstone, leading the physicist

Richard Feynman

to remark to his students, “If you get an inscription like that on your tombstone, you are doing fine!”

He demonstrated the

resolution

of forces before Pierre Varignon, which had not been remarked previously, even though it is a simple

consequence

of the law of their

composition

.

Bookkeeping by double entry may have been known to Stevin, as he was a clerk in Antwerp in his younger years, either practically or through the medium of the works of Italian authors such as Luca Pacioli and Gerolamo Cardano. However, Stevin was the first to recommend the use of impersonal accounts in the national household. He brought it into practice for Prince Maurice, and recommended it to the French statesman Maximilien de BÃÂ©thune, duc de Sully.

Stevin wrote a 36 page booklet called

De Thiende

(“the tenth”), first published in Dutch in 1585, though the French translation ”Disme” subtitle: ”Teaching how all computations that are met in business may be performed by

integers

without the use of

fractions

” doesn’t exceed seven pages. Fractions to Stevin meant

unit fractions

or

Egyptian fractions

.

Decimal fractions

had been employed for the extraction of

square roots

some five centuries before his time, but nobody established their daily use before Stevin. He felt that this innovation was so significant, that he declared the

universal

introduction

of decimal coinage, measures and weights to be merely a question of time.

His notation, however, was rather unwieldy. The point separating the integers from the decimal fractions seems to be the invention of Bartholomaeus Pitiscus, in whose trigonometrical tables (1612) it occurs and it was accepted by John Napier in his logarithmic papers (1614 and 1619).

Stevin printed little circles around the

exponents

of the different powers of one-tenth. That Stevin intended these encircled numerals to denote mere exponents is clear from the fact that he employed the very same symbol for powers of

algebraic

quantities. He didn’t avoid fractional exponents; only

negative

exponents don’t appear in his work.

There are two

complete

editions in French of his works, both printed in Leiden, one in 1608, the other in 1634.

Stevin thought the Dutch language to be excellent for scientific writing, and he translated a lot of the mathematical terms to Dutch. As a result, Dutch is one of the few Western European languages that have a lot of mathematical terms that do not stem from Latin, such as the aforementioned “Wiskunde” (mathematics).

Some of the words he invented evolved after his death: “aftrekken” (subtract) and “delen” (divide) stayed the same, but over time “menigvuldigen” became “vermenigvuldigen” (multiply, the added “ver” has no meaning). “Vergaderen” became “optellen” (add). Another example is the Dutch word for

diameter

: “middellijn”’, literally meaning “line through the middle.”

The word “zomenigmaal” (quotient, literally “that many times”) has become the perhaps less poetic “quotiënt” in modern day Dutch. Other terms did not make it into modern day mathematical Dutch, like “teerling” (dice, although still being used in the meaning as die), instead of cube.

There was a mathematical journal called

Simon Stevin

which published quarterly on pure and applied mathematical topics until 1993.

This entry was adapted from the

Wikipedia

article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Stevin

Simon Stevin as of May 9, 2008.

and by

Number Theory

and its History,

Oystein Ore

, 1948, page 313-314

Title

Simon Stevin

Canonical name

SimonStevin

Date of creation

2013-03-22 18:02:57

Last modified on

2013-03-22 18:02:57

Owner

PrimeFan (13766)

Last modified by

PrimeFan (13766)

Numerical id

8

Author

PrimeFan (13766)

Entry type

Biography

Classification

msc 01A40

Related topic

TriangleMidSegmentTheorem

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