User:Vrrm/Timeline of literature

This is a timeline of literature and history.

Before 1000 BC

 * ca. 70,000 BC — South Africa, ochre rocks adorned with scratched geometric patterns.

1st millennium BC

 * c. 1000 BC — Vulgar fractions used by the Egyptians. However, only unit fractions are used (i.e., those with 1 as the numerator) and interpolation tables are used to approximate the values of the other fractions.

1st millennium AD

 * 975 — Al-Batani extended the Indian concepts of sine and cosine to other trigonometrical ratios, like tangent, secant and their inverse functions. Derived the formulae: $$ \sin \alpha = \tan \alpha / \sqrt{1+\tan^2 \alpha} $$ and $$ \cos \alpha = 1 / \sqrt{1 + \tan^2 \alpha}$$.

16th century

 * 1596 — Ludolf van Ceulen computes π to twenty decimal places using inscribed and circumscribed polygons.

17th century

 * 1614 — John Napier discusses Napierian logarithms in Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio,

18th century

 * 1706 — John Machin develops a quickly converging inverse-tangent series for π and computes π to 100 decimal places,

19th century

 * 1801 — Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, Carl Friedrich Gauss's number theory treatise, is published in Latin

20th century

 * 1900 — David Hilbert publishes Hilbert's problems, a list of unsolved problems

21st century

 * 2002 — Manindra Agrawal, Nitin Saxena, and Neeraj Kayal of IIT Kanpur present an unconditional deterministic polynomial time algorithm to determine whether a given number is prime (the AKS primality test),