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A new
has excited mathematicians around the
. Recently-unearthed documents show a decimal point in the records of a
named Giovanni Bianchini, who lived in Venice in the 1440s. Historians have hailed the
as being significant, as it means the decimal point is 150 years older than was
thought. Bianchini was a keen astronomer. He made many notations about his
of the heavens. He also provided Venetians with
based on
calculations of the alignment of stars and
. Mathematician Dr Glen Van Brummelen noticed the
of a decimal point in one of Bianchini's treatises between 1441 and 1450.
