Kaikea (Christian),

      This is a very good paper on the life and contributions of Nicolo 
   Fontana ("Tartaglia").  One suggestion I have is that would have been 
   better to bring in some additional material about the controversies
   between Tartaglia, Cardano, and Ferrari.  A lot of primary source
   material has survived because this was such a "big deal" in the 
   history of algebra.   For instance, if you look at the page 

   http://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Tartaglia_v_Cardan.html

   (linked from our course homepage), you will see a number of extracts
   from letters of the principal people in the story, a translation
   of the actual text of Tartaglia's poem on the solution of the cubic,
   samples of the problems that came up in the contests you described, 
   and so forth. That would have been a very good source to consult in 
   addition to the ones you used. 

   A couple of other more mathematical comments: 

   (1) On "Tartaglia's triangle" -- it's slightly strange (historically)
       to say this was "based off Pascal's Triangle" since Pascal lived
       about 100 years after Tartaglia.  Of course, the real point
       is that the "Pascal triangle" for binomial coefficients was known
       well before Pascal's time and his name got attached to it because
       it was included in a well-known book he wrote about probabilities.
       There are diagrams showing this pattern that appeared in Chinese
       texts, in particular, that date to hundreds of years before either
       Tartaglia or Pascal.

   (2) I think the credit for solving the quartic (4th degree) equations
       should go entirely to Ferrari.  Cardano included a discussion
       of Ferrari's work in the Ars Magna, mostly because Ferrari was
       his (Cardano's) "prize pupil."  Cardano was unusually careful
       for his time in trying to give correct attributions of who
       should get credit for things, and that's what he says.   

   

   Grade:  A-