Stevin, detail of an oil painting by an
unknown artist; University Library of
Leiden, Neth.
Courtesy of the University Library of Leiden,
Neth.
Simon Stevin
Simon Stevin, (born 1548, Bruges—died 1620, The Hague or Leiden, Neth.), Flemish mathematician
who helped standardize the use of decimal fractions and aided in refuting Aristotle’s doctrine that
heavy bodies fall faster than light ones.
Stevin was a merchant’s clerk in Antwerp for a time and
eventually rose to become commissioner of public works and
quartermaster general of the army under Prince Maurice of
Nassau. He engineered a system of sluices to flood certain
areas and drive off any enemy, an important defense of
Holland. He also invented a 26-passenger carriage with sails
for use along the seashore.
In De Beghinselen der Weeghconst (1586; “Statics and Hydrostatics”) Stevin published the theorem of
the triangle of forces. The knowledge of this triangle of forces, equivalent to the parallelogram diagram
of forces, gave a new impetus to the study of statics, which had previously been founded on the theory
of the lever. He also discovered that the downward pressure of a liquid is independent of the shape of
its vessel and depends only on its height and base.
In 1585 Stevin published a small pamphlet, La Thiende (“The Tenth”), in which he presented an
elementary and thorough account of decimal fractions and their daily use. Although he did not invent
decimal fractions and his notation was rather unwieldy, he established their use in day-to-day
mathematics. He declared that the universal introduction of decimal coinage, measures, and weights
would be only a question of time. The same year he wrote La Disme (“The Decimal”) on the same
subject.
Stevin published a report in 1586 on his experiment in which two lead spheres, one 10 times as heavy
as the other, fell a distance of 30 feet in the same time. His report received little attention, though it
preceded by three years Galileo’s first treatise concerning gravity and by 18 years Galileo’s theoretical
work on falling bodies.
Simon Stevin -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia https://www.britannica.com/print/article/565994
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CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Simon Stevin
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 01 January 2020
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Simon-Stevin
ACCESS DATE: April 20, 2020
Simon Stevin -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia https://www.britannica.com/print/article/565994
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