The History of Mathematics During Bombelli's Time

By about 1500 A.D., Europe was undergoing many changes.  The Middle Ages were coming to an end and the Modern World was being created.  Great, new mathematics would be born each century leading up until modern day, but focusing on the past mathematical inventions is essential in learning what Bombelli's time was like from a mathematician's point of view.

 In 1527, Peter Aprian (1495 - 1552), a German arithmetician, published a book about the Pascal Triangle.  This version of Pascal's Triangle appears more than a century before Pascal's investigation of the properties of this triangle [3].

Around 1492, Francesco Pellos (1450 - 1500) wrote a commercial arithmetic book, Compendio de lo abaco, and he used a "dot" to indicate the division of an integer by the power of ten.  This leads to what we now know as the decimal point [3].

In 1489, Johannes Widman (1462 - 1498) wrote an arithmetic book which contained the first recorded appearances of "+" and "-" signs.  This book had more examples and became more widely known than any other book that were released around that time period [3].

There were many more ingenious mathematical processes and ideas formed around this time period, but there are also some notable, important periods in history during this time.  In 1534, the Act of Supremacy emerged making the King of England the supreme head of the Church of England.  In 1517, the Protestant Reformation occurred.  In 1492, one of the most famous discoveries were made; Columbus discovered America [3].  Of course, there are many more important points in history during this time, but the ones mentioned appear to be the most important around the time of Rafael Bombelli's birth.

References:
[3] http://www.math.wichita.edu/~richardson/timeline.html