Mathematician and engineer, born in Bruges, NW Belgium. He held offices under Prince Maurice of Orange, wrote on fortification, book-keeping and decimals, and invented a system of sluices to be used for defence by flooding certain areas, and a carriage propelled by sails. He was responsible for introducing the use of decimals, which were soon generally adopted.
Simon Stevin (1548/49 – 1620) was a Flemish mathematician and engineer. He also translated various mathematical terms into Dutch, making it the only European language in which the word for mathematics ('wiskunde') was not derived from Greek (via Latin).
Biography
Stevin was born in Bruges, Flanders (now Belgium).
In Bruges there is a Simon Stevin Square which contains his statue by Eugen Simonis.
Discoveries and inventions
His claims to fame are varied. Around the year 1600 Stevin, with Prince Maurice of Orange and twenty-six others, made use of it on the beach between Scheveningen and Petten.
Philosophy of science
Stevin had developed a theory about a bygone age of wisdom, for which even Hugo Grotius gave him great credit. Stevin's goal was to bring about a second age of wisdom, in which mankind would have recovered all of its earlier knowledge. He had deduced that the language spoken in this age would have had to be Dutch, because, as he had showed empirically, in that language, more concepts could be indicated with monosyllabic words than in any of the (European) languages he had compared it with.
Geometry and physics
Stevin was the first to show how to model regular and semiregular polyhedra by delineating their frames in a plane. Stevin also distinguished stable from unstable equilibria.
He demonstrated the resolution of forces before Pierre Varignon, which had not been remarked previously, even though it is a simple consequence of the law of their composition.
Stevin discovered the hydrostatic paradox, which states that the downward pressure of a liquid is independent of the shape of the vessel, and depends only on its height and base.
He also gave the measure for the pressure on any given portion of the side of a vessel.
He was the first to explain the tides using the attraction of the moon.
In 1586, he demonstrated that two objects of different weight fall down with exactly the same speed.
Music theory
Stevin was the first author in the West (1585, simultaneously with, and independently of, Chu Tsai-Yu in China) to give a mathematically accurate specification for equal temperament.
Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping by double entry may have been known to Stevin, as he was a clerk in Antwerp in his younger years, either practically or through the medium of the works of Italian authors such as Luca Pacioli and Gerolamo Cardano. However, Stevin was the first to recommend the use of impersonal accounts in the national household.
Decimal fractions
Stevin wrote a small pamphlet called De Thiende ('the tenth'), first published in Dutch in 1586, and not exceeding seven pages in the French translation.
Decimal fractions had been employed for the extraction of square roots some five centuries before his time, but nobody established their daily use before Stevin.
His notation is rather unwieldy.
Stevin printed little circles around the exponents of the different powers of one-tenth. That Stevin intended these encircled numerals to denote mere exponents is clear from the fact that he employed the very same symbol for powers of algebraic quantities.
Stevin wrote on other scientific subjects—for instance optics, geography, astronomy—and a number of his writings were translated into Latin by W.
Neologisms
Stevin thought the Dutch language to be excellent for scientific writing, and he translated a lot of the mathematical terms to Dutch. As a result, Dutch is the only Western European language that has a lot of mathematical terms that do not stem from Latin, including its Dutch name: wiskunde.
His eye for the importance of having the scientific language be the same as the language of the craftsmen may show from the dedication of his book De Thiende ('The Disme' or 'The Tenth'): 'Simon Stevin wishes the stargazers, surveyors, carpet measurers, body measurers in general, coin measurers and tradespeople good luck.' Further on in the same pamphlet, he writes: "[this text] teaches us all calculations that are needed by the people without using fractions.
Some of the words he invented evolved: 'aftrekken' (subtract) and 'delen' (divide) stayed the same, but over time 'menigvuldigen' became 'vermenigvuldigen' (multiply, the added 'ver' has no meaning).
Another example is the Dutch word for diameter: 'middellijn', lit.: line through the middle.
He was so eager to promote the Dutch language that he invented a name for the Dutch government department of public affairs: the department of Waterstaat.
The word 'zomenigmaal' (quotient lit.
Publications
Amongst others, he published:
Tafelen van Interest (Tables of interest) in 1582;Further reading
Virtually all of Stevin's writings have been published in five volumes with introduction and analysis in: (1955-1966) Dijksterhuis, E.J. Another good source about Stevin is the French-language bundle: (2004) Bibliothèque royale de Belgique Simon Stevin (1548-1620): L'émergence de la nouvelle science. A recent work on Simon Stevin in Dutch is: Devreese, J. De geniale wereld van Simon Stevin 1548-1620.Trivia
The study association of mechanical engineering at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, W.S.V. Simon Stevin is named after Simon Stevin. In Stevin's memory, the association has called its bar "De Weeghconst" and owns a self-built fleet of land yachts.
User Comments Add a comment…