Taylor Series - History

History

The Greek philosopher Zeno considered the problem of summing an infinite series to achieve a finite result, but rejected it as an impossibility: the result was Zeno's paradox. Later, Aristotle proposed a philosophical resolution of the paradox, but the mathematical content was apparently unresolved until taken up by Democritus and then Archimedes. It was through Archimedes's method of exhaustion that an infinite number of progressive subdivisions could be performed to achieve a finite result. Liu Hui independently employed a similar method a few centuries later.

In the 14th century, the earliest examples of the use of Taylor series and closely related methods were given by Madhava of Sangamagrama. Though no record of his work survives, writings of later Indian mathematicians suggest that he found a number of special cases of the Taylor series, including those for the trigonometric functions of sine, cosine, tangent, and arctangent. The Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics further expanded his works with various series expansions and rational approximations until the 16th century.

In the 17th century, James Gregory also worked in this area and published several Maclaurin series. It was not until 1715 however that a general method for constructing these series for all functions for which they exist was finally provided by Brook Taylor, after whom the series are now named.

The Maclaurin series was named after Colin Maclaurin, a professor in Edinburgh, who published the special case of the Taylor result in the 18th century.