Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. at Stagira, a small coastal town in northern Greece. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician to the Macedonian ruler Amyntas II. His mother was Phaestis, a descendant of a family from Chalcis who had moved th...

The arithmetic mean, or as it is sometimes referred to, the average of a data set, is the sum of all data values divided by the number of items in the set. A mean is considered to be a measure of central tendency--it describes a "typical" ...

Cayley was born in England during a short visit of his parents to Richmond, Surrey, but spent his first eight years in Russia where his father plied a living as a merchant. Returning to England to attend a private school, Cayley eventually...

Two closely related laws of number operations. In symbols, they are stated: &math.a; + (&math.b; + &math.c;) = (&math.a; + &math.b;) + &math.c;, and &math.a;(&math.b;&math.c;) = (&math.a;&math.b;)&math.c;. Stated in words: The terms or fac...

Known principally for his discovery of the Möbius strip, which made him a pioneer in the field of topology, August Ferdinand Möbius also did important work in theoretical astronomy and analytic geometry. Möbius, born in Schu...

The French mathematician Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789-1857) provided the foundation for the modern period of rigor in analysis. He launched the theory of functions of a complex variable and was its authoritative pioneer developer. Augustin ...

In mathematics or logic, an unprovable rule or first principle accepted as true because it is self-evident or particularly useful (e.g., “Nothing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect”). The term is of...