Thomas Simpson | |
|---|---|
| Born | 20 August 1710 |
| Died | 14 May 1761 (aged 50) |
| Known for | Simpson's rule Simpson–Weber triangle problem |
Thomas Simpson FRS (20 August 1710 – 14 May 1761) was a British mathematician and inventor known for the eponymous Simpson's rule to approximate definite integrals. The attribution, as often in mathematics, can be debated: this rule had been found 100 years earlier by Johannes Kepler, and in German it is called Keplersche Fassregel.
Simpson was born in Sutton Cheney, Leicestershire. The son of a weaver, [1] Simpson taught himself mathematics. At the age of nineteen, he married a fifty-year old widow with two children. [2] As a youth, he became interested in astrology after seeing a solar eclipse. He also dabbled in divination and caused fits in a girl after 'raising a devil' from her. After this incident, he and his wife had to flee to Derby. [3] He moved with his wife and children to London at age twenty-five, where he supported his family by weaving during the day and teaching mathematics at night. [4]
From 1743, he taught mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Simpson was a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1758, Simpson was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
He died in Market Bosworth, and was laid to rest in Sutton Cheney. A plaque inside the church commemorates him.
Simpson's treatise entitled The Nature and Laws of Chance and The Doctrine of Annuities and Reversions were based on the work of De Moivre and were attempts at making the same material more brief and understandable. Simpson stated this clearly in The Nature and Laws of Chance, referring to De Moivre's Doctrine of Chances: "tho' it neither wants Matter nor Elegance to recommend it, yet the Price must, I am sensible, have put it out of the Power of many to purchase it". In both works, Simpson cited De Moivre's work and did not claim originality beyond the presentation of some more accurate data. While he and De Moivre initially got along, De Moivre eventually felt that his income was threatened by Simpson's work and in his second edition of Annuities upon Lives, wrote in the preface: [5]
"After the pains I have taken to perfect this Second Edition, it may happen, that a certain Person, whom I need not name, out of Compassion to the Public, will publish a Second Edition of his Book on the same Subject, which he will afford at a very moderate Price, not regarding whether he mutilates my Propositions, obscures what is clear, makes a Shew of new Rules, and works by mine; in short, confounds, in his usual way, every thing with a croud of useless Symbols; if this be the Case, I must forgive the indigent Author, and his disappointed Bookseller."
The method commonly called Simpson's Rule was known and used earlier by Bonaventura Cavalieri (a student of Galileo) in 1639, and later by James Gregory; [6] still, the long popularity of Simpson's textbooks invites this association with his name, in that many readers would have learnt it from them.
In the context of disputes surrounding methods advanced by René Descartes, Pierre de Fermat proposed the challenge to find a point D such that the sum of the distances to three given points, A, B and C is least, a challenge popularised in Italy by Marin Mersenne in the early 1640s. Simpson treats the problem in the first part of Doctrine and Application of Fluxions (1750), on pp. 26–28, by the description of circular arcs at which the edges of the triangle ABC subtend an angle of pi/3; in the second part of the book, on pp. 505–506 he extends this geometrical method, in effect, to weighted sums of the distances. Several of Simpson's books contain selections of optimisation problems treated by simple geometrical considerations in similar manner, as (for Simpson) an illuminating counterpart to possible treatment by fluxional (calculus) methods. [7] But Simpson does not treat the problem in the essay on geometrical problems of maxima and minima appended to his textbook on Geometry of 1747, although it does appear in the considerably reworked edition of 1760. Comparative attention might, however, usefully be drawn to a paper in English from eighty years earlier as suggesting that the underlying ideas were already recognised then:
Of further related interest are problems posed in the early 1750s by J. Orchard, in The British Palladium, and by T. Moss, in The Ladies' Diary; or Woman's Almanack (at that period not yet edited by Simpson).
This type of generalisation was later popularised by Alfred Weber in 1909. The Simpson-Weber triangle problem consists in locating a point D with respect to three points A, B, and C in such a way that the sum of the transportation costs between D and each of the three other points is minimised. In 1971, Luc-Normand Tellier [8] found the first direct (non iterative) numerical solution of the Fermat and Simpson-Weber triangle problems. Long before Von Thünen's contributions, which go back to 1818, the Fermat point problem can be seen as the very beginning of space economy.
In 1985, Luc-Normand Tellier [9] formulated an all-new problem called the “attraction-repulsion problem”, which constitutes a generalisation of both the Fermat and Simpson-Weber problems. In its simplest version, the attraction-repulsion problem consists in locating a point D with respect to three points A1, A2 and R in such a way that the attractive forces exerted by points A1 and A2, and the repulsive force exerted by point R cancel each other out. In the same book, Tellier solved that problem for the first time in the triangle case, and he reinterpreted the space economy theory, especially, the theory of land rent, in the light of the concepts of attractive and repulsive forces stemming from the attraction-repulsion problem. That problem was later further analysed by mathematicians like Chen, Hansen, Jaumard and Tuy (1992), [10] and Jalal and Krarup (2003). [11] The attraction-repulsion problem is seen by Ottaviano and Thisse (2005) [12] as a prelude to the New Economic Geography that developed in the 1990s, and earned Paul Krugman a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008.
Colin Maclaurin was a Scottish mathematician who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. He is also known for being a child prodigy and holding the record for being the youngest professor. The Maclaurin series, a special case of the Taylor series, is named after him.
Diophantus of Alexandria was an Alexandrian mathematician, who was the author of a series of books called Arithmetica, many of which are now lost. His texts deal with solving algebraic equations. Diophantine equations and Diophantine approximations are important areas of mathematical research. Diophantus coined the term παρισότης (parisotes) to refer to an approximate equality. This term was rendered as adaequalitas in Latin, and became the technique of adequality developed by Pierre de Fermat to find maxima for functions and tangent lines to curves. Diophantus was the first Greek mathematician who recognized fractions as numbers; thus he allowed positive rational numbers for the coefficients and solutions. In modern use, Diophantine equations are usually algebraic equations with integer coefficients, for which integer solutions are sought.
Adrien-Marie Legendre was a French mathematician who made numerous contributions to mathematics. Well-known and important concepts such as the Legendre polynomials and Legendre transformation are named after him.
Abraham de Moivre FRS was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, a formula that links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory.
Thomas Bayes was an English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister who is known for formulating a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem. Bayes never published what would become his most famous accomplishment; his notes were edited and published posthumously by Richard Price.
The Doctrine of Chances was the first textbook on probability theory, written by 18th-century French mathematician Abraham de Moivre and first published in 1718. De Moivre wrote in English because he resided in England at the time, having fled France to escape the persecution of Huguenots. The book's title came to be synonymous with probability theory, and accordingly the phrase was used in Thomas Bayes' famous posthumous paper An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, wherein a version of Bayes' theorem was first introduced.
In mathematical analysis, the maxima and minima of a function, known collectively as extrema, are the largest and smallest value of the function, either within a given range, or on the entire domain. Pierre de Fermat was one of the first mathematicians to propose a general technique, adequality, for finding the maxima and minima of functions.
Alfred Weber was a German economist, geographer, sociologist and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography.
Calculus, originally called infinitesimal calculus, is a mathematical discipline focused on limits, continuity, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series. Many elements of calculus appeared in ancient Greece, then in China and the Middle East, and still later again in medieval Europe and in India. Infinitesimal calculus was developed in the late 17th century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently of each other. An argument over priority led to the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy which continued until the death of Leibniz in 1716. The development of calculus and its uses within the sciences have continued to the present day.
In geometry, the geometric median of a discrete set of sample points in a Euclidean space is the point minimizing the sum of distances to the sample points. This generalizes the median, which has the property of minimizing the sum of distances for one-dimensional data, and provides a central tendency in higher dimensions. It is also known as the 1-median, spatial median, Euclidean minisum point, or Torricelli point.
Ars Conjectandi is a book on combinatorics and mathematical probability written by Jacob Bernoulli and published in 1713, eight years after his death, by his nephew, Niklaus Bernoulli. The seminal work consolidated, apart from many combinatorial topics, many central ideas in probability theory, such as the very first version of the law of large numbers: indeed, it is widely regarded as the founding work of that subject. It also addressed problems that today are classified in the twelvefold way and added to the subjects; consequently, it has been dubbed an important historical landmark in not only probability but all combinatorics by a plethora of mathematical historians. The importance of this early work had a large impact on both contemporary and later mathematicians; for example, Abraham de Moivre.
A timeline of algebra and geometry
A timeline of calculus and mathematical analysis.
This is a timeline of pure and applied mathematics history. It is divided here into three stages, corresponding to stages in the development of mathematical notation: a "rhetorical" stage in which calculations are described purely by words, a "syncopated" stage in which quantities and common algebraic operations are beginning to be represented by symbolic abbreviations, and finally a "symbolic" stage, in which comprehensive notational systems for formulas are the norm.
Fermat's right triangle theorem is a non-existence proof in number theory, published in 1670 among the works of Pierre de Fermat, soon after his death. It is the only complete proof given by Fermat. It has several equivalent formulations, one of which was stated in 1225 by Fibonacci. In its geometric forms, it states:
Adequality is a technique developed by Pierre de Fermat in his treatise Methodus ad disquirendam maximam et minimam to calculate maxima and minima of functions, tangents to curves, area, center of mass, least action, and other problems in calculus. According to André Weil, Fermat "introduces the technical term adaequalitas, adaequare, etc., which he says he has borrowed from Diophantus. As Diophantus V.11 shows, it means an approximate equality, and this is indeed how Fermat explains the word in one of his later writings.". Diophantus coined the word παρισότης (parisotēs) to refer to an approximate equality. Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac translated Diophantus's Greek word into Latin as adaequalitas. Paul Tannery's French translation of Fermat’s Latin treatises on maxima and minima used the words adéquation and adégaler.
An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances is a work on the mathematical theory of probability by Thomas Bayes, published in 1763, two years after its author's death, and containing multiple amendments and additions due to his friend Richard Price. The title comes from the contemporary use of the phrase "doctrine of chances" to mean the theory of probability, which had been introduced via the title of a book by Abraham de Moivre. Contemporary reprints of the Essay carry a more specific and significant title: A Method of Calculating the Exact Probability of All Conclusions founded on Induction.
Luc-Normand Tellier is a Professor Emeritus in spatial economics of the University of Quebec at Montreal.
In geometry, the Weber problem, named after Alfred Weber, is one of the most famous problems in location theory. It requires finding a point in the plane that minimizes the sum of the transportation costs from this point to n destination points, where different destination points are associated with different costs per unit distance.
William Chapple (1718–1781) was an English surveyor and mathematician. His mathematical discoveries were mostly in plane geometry and include:
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