Nidya Diaz

MA Algebra II

Quarter One Current Issues Presentation

Nicole Oresme

Nicole OresmeNicole Oresme was born in

the village of Allemagne around 1323. Not much is known about his family but it is thought that he came from a pesant family because he studied at the College of Navarre, an institution for students to poor to pay expenses while they studied at the University at Paris. He studies theology, logic and philosophy.

Mathematics Oresme had a

meathod of graphing velocity versus time of an object with constantaccelaration. Moments in time were marked along a horizantal like he called longitudes. He drew vertical or lines of latitude to represent an object’s velocity at a moment.

His graph looked something like this.

Mathematics Except for the fact

that he used lines instead of points, his picture looked just like a modern graph of a line. Oresme even noticed that his graph had a constant slope. Becase much of algebra hadn’t been invented he didn’t know how to graph an equations or a curve.

Math… Oresme invented

coordinate geometry and his work led to the later discovery of analytican geometry by Rene Descartes and was the first to use fractional exponents.

Sources http://www.nicole-oresme.com/seiten/oresme-

biography.html http://mathforum.org/cgraph/history/oresme.h

tml http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathemat

icians/Oresme.html