History of Mathematics I

From this point on, mathematical developments came swiftly, contributing to and benefiting from contemporary advances in the physical sciences. This progress was greatly aided by advances in printing. The earliest mathematical books printed were Peurbach's Theoricae nova planetarum(1472}, followed by a book on commercial arithmetic, the Treviso Arithmetic (1478), and then the first extant book on mathematics, Euclid's Elements, printed and published by Ratdolt in 1482.

Driven by the demands of navigation and the growing need for accurate maps of large areas,trigonometry grew to be a major branch of mathematics. Bartholomaeus Pitiscus was the first to use the word, publishing his Trigonometria in 1595. Regiomontanus's table of sines and cosines was published in 1533.^[44]

By century's end, thanks to Regiomontanus (1436–76) and François Vieta (1540–1603), among others, mathematics was written using Hindu-Arabic numerals and in a form not too different from the notation used today.