TARTAGLIA or TARTALEA, NICCOLO [Nicola Fontana] (c. 1506-1559), Italian mathematician, was born at Brescia. His childhood was passed in dire poverty. During the sack of Brescia in 1512, he was horribly mutilated by some French soldiers. From these injuries he slowly recovered, but he long continued to stammer in his speech, whence the nickname "Tartaglia." He was self-taught, but we find him at Verona in 1521 an esteemed teacher of mathematics. In 1534 he went to Venice. For Tartaglia's solution of cubic equations, which he derived from his master Scipione Ferro (d. 1525), and his contests with Antonio Marie Floridas, see ALGEBRA : History. In 1548 Tartaglia ac cepted a situation as professor of Euclid at Brescia, but returned to Venice at the end of 18 months. He died at Venice in Tartaglia's first printed work, entitled Nuova scienzia (Venice, 1537), dealt with the theory and practice of gunnery. He found the elevation giving the greatest range to be 45°, but failed to demonstrate the correctness of his intuition. His Quesiti et invenzioni diverse (1546), a collection of the author's replies to questions addressed to him, was dedicated to Henry VIII. of England. Problems in artillery occupy two out of nine books; the sixth treats of fortification ; the ninth gives several examples of the solution of cubic equations. He published in 1551 Regola
generale per sollevare ogni affondata nave, intitolata la Travagliata Invenzione (an allusion to his personal troubles at Brescia), set ting forth a method for raising sunken ships, and describing the diving-bell, then little known in western Europe. His largest work, Trattato generale di numcri e misure, is a comprehensive mathematical treatise (Venice, 1556, i56o). He published the first Italian translation of Euclid and the earliest version of some of the works of Archimedes (1543), including De insidenti bus aquae, of which his Latin now holds the place of the lost Greek text. Tartaglia claimed the invention of the gunner's quadrant.