Tartaglia, Niccolò

Tartaglia, Niccolò (nēk-kōlô` tärtä`lyä), c.1500–1557, Italian engineer and mathematician. Largely self-educated, he taught mathematics at Verona, Brescia, and Venice. A pioneer in applying mathematics to artillery, he recorded his results in Della nova scientia (1537). He developed a solution for cubic equations that Geronimo Cardano (with his pupil Ludovico Ferrari) completed and published in his Ars magna (1545), thereby precipitating a bitter dispute; Tartaglia published his version as Quesiti et invenzioni diverse (1546). He wrote also a treatise on pure and applied mathematics, General trattato di numeri et misure (6 parts, 1556–60) and made Italian translations of works of Euclid and Archimedes.

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Tartaglia, Niccolò 

Born circa 1499 in Brescia; died Dec. 13 or 14, 1557, in Venice. Italian mathematician.

Tartaglia wrote on a number of subjects, including problems in mathematics, mechanics, ballistics, geodesy, and fortification. In his Nova scientia (A New Science), which appeared in 1537, he showed that the trajectory of a projectile is a parabola and that the range of a projectile is greatest when the angle of projection is 45°. Another important work is General trattato di numen et misure (General Treatise on Numbers and Measures), which was published in six parts between 1556 and 1560. It contains extensive material on problems of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. The name of Tartaglia, along with that of G. Cardano, is associated with the development of a method for solving cubic equations.

REFERENCE

Istoriia matematiki s drevneishikh vremen do nachala XIX stoletiia, vol. 2. Moscow, 1970.