ABSTRACT
In surveying up to Renaissance, the number of instruments had hardly increased since antiquity. During the Renaissance, the problem of measuring heights and distances by indirect methods was solved by elementary theorems of triangle. Filippo Brunelleschi, like other great builders of the Renaissance, was trained in a field other than engineering or architecture: he was trained as a Zurich goldsmith; Donato Bramante, a painter; Raphael, a painter; and Michelangelo, a sculptor. Fortress engineering, in addition to hydraulic engineering, continued to be that sphere of engineering in which theory and practice, architecture and mathematics were most interwoven. In Mathematicorum Hypomnemata de Statica, Simon Stevin makes correct use of the parallelogram of forces and the notion of the static moment. The problem of force components was tackled by Leonardo da Vinci, Stevin, Roberval and others before it was solved by Pierre Varignon and I. Newton. The Dutchman Stevin dealt with center of gravity, level, and the inclined plane.
