Marin Getaldić – A look on a new era. On occasion of the 450th anniversary of his birth

Among the numerous Croatian humanists who left a mark in the development of Western European science and culture, Dubrovnik nobleman Marin Getaldić (1568-1666) is the greatest Croatian mathematician and physicist of the 16th and 17th centuries. Although he was educated in the hometown for performing of administrative jobs in the service of the Republic of Ragusa, in a very specific way, he became involved in scientific research and his ideas were accepted by the most prominent scientific circles and names of contemporary Europe, such as Galileo Galilei, François Viète etc. He was developing the most current area of Renaissance mathematics - the symbolic algebra. Getaldić also wrote the first complete manual of new algebraic analysis applied to diverse materials. Having achieved remarkable results, he came closer to founding of a new mathematical field - analytical geometry. Getaldić particularly focused on the development of mathematical methods and their application in the research of natural sciences. With that approach, different from the previous, traditional, and largely quantitative description of the world, he laid down the main tendencies of the modern approach to the research in natural sciences