Person: Cataldi, Pietro Antonio

Pietro Cataldi was an Italian mathematician who wrote around 30 books on mathematics, and some on other topics.

Pietro was educated in Bologna although he does not seem to have attended the university there; rather he began teaching mathematics at the age of seventeen.
Cataldi wrote around thirty books on mathematics, and some on other topics.
Cataldi calculated a list of all primes up to 750 and a list of the factorisation of all numbers up to 800.
Cataldi found square roots of numbers by use of an infinite series leading to an early investigation into continued fractions.
Cataldi begins this work with a commentary on a recently published work on the same topic, namely Pellegrino Borello's Regola e modo facilissimo di quadrare il cerchio (1609).
Cataldi, taking Van Ceulen's approximation, works hard at the finding of integers which nearly represent the ratio.
Cataldi then looks at the more general question of constructing squares and rectangles with an area equal to that of a number of given shapes with curved edges.
Cataldi also published an edition of Euclid's Elements.
It is in the definition which Cataldi gave of equidistant for this definition, which we quoted above, assumes that the given line is the locus of points at a constant distance from the second line and it also assumes that it is a straight line.
Cataldi tried, without success, to set up an academy of mathematics in Bologna.

Born 15 April 1548, Bologna, Papal States (now Italy). Died 11 February 1626, Bologna, Papal States (now Italy).

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Astronomy, Origin Italy, Number Theory, Special Numbers And Numerals

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O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive