The History of Mathematics from the Campo Grande in Lisbon

I discovered something interesting on the way to one of the social events at the FLoC 26 joint conference event at Lisbon. Just east of the conference venue, ISCTE University Institute , there is a strip of park called the Campo Grande. On the path between the park and the road to its west, you can find a series of plaques celebrating events in the history of mathematics. The plaques are in chronological order going from south to north along what seems to be a linear time line. So Wiles's 1994 proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is right next to Hales's 1998 proof of Kepler's Sphere Packing Conjecture and very close to the last plaque dated 2007, while plaque no, 1 about the Rhind papyrus is 100 metres or so south of plaque no. 2 about the Berlin Papyrus.

It looks like one or two of the plaques have been removed for some reason, but I believe that you will find below images of all of the more than 70 extant plaques. In case you are in the vicinity and would like to see for yourself, I've also given a couple of maps to show the locale. I don't know any Portuguese, but I managed to figure out most of the text from the names and the dates. You need a bit of ingenuity to work out some of the names, but it's not too hard to guess who "Arquimedes" is, for example. The one just after Archimedes' work on the volumes of spheres and cylinders in 225 B.C. is the hardest to read because it is badly stained, but I think that the date is 190 B.C. and that the name "Hiparco" is the Portuguese rendering of the name of the gentleman we call "Hipparchus", who is indeed considered the founder of trigonometry. A vital subscript is a bit obscured by a stain on the final plaque from 2007, which is actually about the computer modelling of the exceptional Lie group E₈

I enjoyed my return visit to the path the morning after the social event to take photos of the plaques. My warmest thanks and congratulations go to whoever organised and funded this wonderul celebration of some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect. I hope you enjoy browsing through the results of their endeavours.

Rob Arthan 2nd August 2026

Maps of Lisbon and the Campo Grande

The Plaques