Tartaglia, Niccolô

(Niccolô Fontana, 1499-1557)

   Italian physicist and mathematician. He grew up at Brescia, where at age 12 he suffered the facial wounds that made him a stammerer (the mean-ing of Tartaglia) during French pillaging of the city. His father's early death left him in great poverty, but his love of mathematics and de-termination to learn enabled him to get an education. He worked as a teacher of abaco (commercial arithmetic) at Verona from about 1516 until 1534, when he moved to Venice to teach mathematics. Tartaglia was a close student of the Latin translations of ancient Greek math-ematical authors and edited several of them. His Opera Archimedis / Works of Archimedes (1543), which reprints the medieval translations made by a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, William of Moerbeke, included On Floating Bodies, which was a major influence on the criticism of Aristotelian physics. From this tract, Tartaglia himself derived the hydrostatic principles underlying his treatise on the raising of sunken vessels, Travagliata inventione / A Hard-won Discovery (1551) as well as his posthumously published table of specific gravities. His Ital-ian translation of Euclid's Elements (1543) was the first translation of this fundamental geometrical text into any European vernacular. Other works include Nova scientia /New Science (1537), a treatise on me-chanics which advances an influential theorem defining the proper ele-vation (45 degrees) for attaining the maximum range for a cannon and which also shows some significant departures from Aristotelian physics; Quesiti e inventioni diverse /Various Questions and Inventions (1546); and his last work, General trattato di numeri e misure / General Treatise on Numbers and Measures (1556), a survey of pure and applied mathematics. Tartaglia's greatest single mathematical discovery, the so-lution for cubic equations, was made at Verona. This discovery led to a quarrel with Girolamo Cardano, who published it in 1545 (without Tartaglia's permission, but giving him credit) after Tartaglia had divulged it to him in secret.