Mathematics

Secrets of Science of Age of Intrigue
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The 17th century was a time of great developments in mathematics across Europe, with Isaac Newton as a premier mind in England.

Summary of developments:

• Galileo, an Italian, observed the moons of Jupiter in orbit about that planet, using a telescope based on a toy imported from Holland
• Tycho Brahe, a Dane, gathered an enormous quantity of mathematical data describing the positions of the planets in the sky
• Johannes Kepler, a German, began to work with Brahe's data and succeeded in formulating mathematical laws of planetary motion
• John Napier, in Scotland, was the first to investigate natural logarithms
• René Descartes (1596-1650), a French mathematician and philosopher, developed the analytic geometry that allowed the orbits of the planets to be plotted on a graph, in Cartesian coordinates
• Isaac Newton, an Englishman, discovered the laws of physics explaining Kepler's Laws, and brought together the concepts now known as calculus
• Independently, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in Germany, also developed calculus and much of the notation still in use today