Timeline of Mathematics - 17th Century

17th Century

• 1614 – John Napier discusses Napierian logarithms in Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio,
• 1617 – Henry Briggs discusses decimal logarithms in Logarithmorum Chilias Prima,
• 1618 – John Napier publishes the first references to e in a work on logarithms.
• 1619 – René Descartes discovers analytic geometry (Pierre de Fermat claimed that he also discovered it independently),
• 1619 – Johannes Kepler discovers two of the Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra.
• 1629 – Pierre de Fermat develops a rudimentary differential calculus,
• 1634 – Gilles de Roberval shows that the area under a cycloid is three times the area of its generating circle,
• 1636 – Muhammad Baqir Yazdi jointly discovered the pair of amicable numbers 9,363,584 and 9,437,056 along with Descartes (1636).
• 1637 – Pierre de Fermat claims to have proven Fermat's Last Theorem in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica,
• 1637 – First use of the term imaginary number by René Descartes; it was meant to be derogatory.
• 1654 – Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat create the theory of probability,
• 1655 – John Wallis writes Arithmetica Infinitorum,
• 1658 – Christopher Wren shows that the length of a cycloid is four times the diameter of its generating circle,
• 1665 – Isaac Newton works on the fundamental theorem of calculus and develops his version of infinitesimal calculus,
• 1668 – Nicholas Mercator and William Brouncker discover an infinite series for the logarithm while attempting to calculate the area under a hyperbolic segment,
• 1671 – James Gregory develops a series expansion for the inverse-tangent function (originally discovered by Madhava)
• 1673 – Gottfried Leibniz also develops his version of infinitesimal calculus,
• 1675 – Isaac Newton invents an algorithm for the computation of functional roots,
• 1680s – Gottfried Leibniz works on symbolic logic,
• 1691 – Gottfried Leibniz discovers the technique of separation of variables for ordinary differential equations,
• 1693 – Edmund Halley prepares the first mortality tables statistically relating death rate to age,
• 1696 – Guillaume de L'Hôpital states his rule for the computation of certain limits,
• 1696 – Jakob Bernoulli and Johann Bernoulli solve brachistochrone problem, the first result in the calculus of variations,