List of Famous Mathematicians and their Contributions This article enlists the names of those mathematicians whose theorems, results and inventions paved a path for deep research in mathematics. Here is some information about the same.
There is certainly no end to the series of mathematicians whose works created the platform for others to produce seminal works in mathematics. But since it is indeed not possible to list every mathematician who has contributed to this great science, I have made a humble attempt to compile a list of some really well-known mathematicians whose great works revolutionized the scientific and mathematical world. Famous Mathematicians List Mathematics has witnessed some of the most genius brains pondering over complex problems and solving them to unravel mysteries of Universe, science and life. The world salutes the great mathematicians and their contributions. Mathematics knows no religion, culture, color, creed or gender. There have been famous black mathematicians and at the same time, female mathematicians and their contributions, that have shaped the mathematical world, all across the globe. Archimedes The greatest mathematicians of ancient era, Archimedes made phenomenal contribution in the field of mathematics. His works include integral calculus studies and finding various computation techniques to determine volume and area of several shapes including the conic section. Euclid Euclid, the 'father of Geometry', wrote the book ,"Euclid's Elements", that is considered to be the greatest piece of historical works in mathematics. The book is divided into 13 parts and in it, Euclid has discussed in details about geometry (what is now called Euclidean geometry). His contributions are also famous in the fields of spherical geometry, conic sections and number theory. Aryabhatta Aryabhatta, the greatest Indian mathematician of ancient era, has been famous for his mathematical works and theorems on astronomical bodies that have been found to be very accurate in of modern calculations. "Aryabhatiya", his only work to have survived has given the world innumerable theorems and research subjects. His two other major contributions are the, introduction of zero to the world and calculating the approximate value of pie. His works are also spread in fields like include algebra, arithmetic, trigonometry, quadratic equations and the sine table. Ramanujam Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar, the greatest Indian mathematician of 20th century, contributed immensely in fields like number theory, mathematical analysis, string theory and crystallography. His genius has been ired by some greatest contemporary mathematicians of his time. He is hailed to be one of the most famous mathematicians in the field of number theory. Although he lived for a short span of 32 years, he compiled nearly 3900 phenomenal results that leave even the best mathematical brains of today in sheer awe and wonder!
René Descartes The French philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes was famous for his method of expressing geometric shapes in the form of algebraic equation. It was because of Rene Descartes that we got introduced to the beautiful branch of co-ordinate geometry. The Cartesian coordinates, in fact, refer to his name. Besides this Rene made valuable contributions in the field of optics and energy conservation. Leonhard Euler Euler, a Swiss mathematician and physicists is widely acclaimed for his contributions in the field of function notation. His mathematical genius has been proved by his contribution in the fields of infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. His mathematical works and research in optics, mechanics, fluid dynamics have been hailed to be very influential. Fibonacci Leonardo of Pisa, the greatest European Italian mathematician, popularly known as Fibonacci, was the first mathematician to introduce Hindu - Arabic system in Europe, that is the positional system of using ten digits with a decimal point and zero. He is popular for using Fibonacci number sequence, that is, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 11....in the book authored by him, known as Book of Calculation, the Liber Abaci. Carl F. Gauss M Carl F. Gauss, a German mathematician, known as Princeps mathematicorum meaning, "the Prince of Mathematicians" or "the foremost of mathematicians" was a child prodigy and a genius. Even as a teenager, he is believed to have made remarkable mathematical contributions. Carl F. Gauss made path breaking contributions in fields like set theory, statistics, differential analysis, geophysics, electrostatics, number theory and astronomy. He proved the fundamental theorem of Algebra and made various contribution in number theory. Sir Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest mathematician and physicist, the world has ever produced. His contributions in mathematics are spread in almost every field. However, he developed Calculus, both differential and integral, that are, still the most important aspects of higher mathematics. Using Calculus, he made it easier to find the area bounded by closed curves. In physics, his most famous and world changing contribution was the discovery of existence of gravitation force in our surrounding. Blaise Pascal Blaise Pascal, French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, contributed in several areas of mathematics, but he is widely known for Pascal's triangle. He invented the first mechanical adding machine in the year 1642. The unit of atmospheric pressure, Pascal (Pa) has been named in his honor. He also made contributions in the field of computer
and the programming language pascal was named after him, in 1972. Pythagoras The Greek mathematician and philosopher, known as the 'father of numbers', is famous for the discovery of Pythagorean theorem formula, which states that in a right angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse (z), is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, x and y - that is, x2 + y2 = z2. Benjamin Banneker A child prodigy, a watch designer and a mathematician, Bannerker discovered many puzzles in fields of trigonometry. He was a genius in logarithms and used them extensively in trigonometry. He is still regarded as the most popular black mathematician. John Von Neumann The Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, John made valuable contribution in several fields like set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry and statistics. His operator theory in mechanics is still regarded as one of his most pioneering works. He was also a key figure in the development of game theory. Joseph Fourier The Fourier's law and Fourier transform are named after him. He is also accredited with the discovery of the green house effect. He is popular for discovering Fourier series and its uses in determining its application of real life examples in heat transfer and vibrations. Sophie Germain Especially known for her work on 'Fermat's Last Theorem', Sophie was one of the initiators of the elasticity theory and also contributed to number theory and philosophy. She was regarded as the 'the revolutionary mathematician' of her times. Amalie Emmy Noether She gave path breaking theorems in algebra field. The most popular, "Noether's Theorem" connects symmetry and conservation laws in Physics. She also made valuable contributions to the theories of algebraic invariants and number fields. Albert Einstein The scientific world was amused by the Einstein's theory of relativity. Although Albert Einstein was physicist, his applied mathematical theorems to reach to apt conclusions. Known as "father of Physics", he can be best described as a mathematical physicist. He also won the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his contributions to physics and the discovery of law of photoelectric effect.
Certainly, talking in detail about contribution of each of these geniuses is not possible right here as a book can be compiled about contributions made by each of these mathematicians. The mathematical world has immensely benefited from the works of these geniuses!
The 10 best mathematicians
Alex Bellos selects the maths geniuses whose revolutionary discoveries changed our world
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o Alex Bellos o The Observer, Sunday 11 April 2010 o Article history
Pythagoras, from a 1920s textbook. Photograph: © Blue Lantern Studio/Corbis
Pythagoras (circa 570-495BC)
Vegetarian mystical leader and number-obsessive, he owes his standing as the most famous name in maths due to a theorem about right-angled triangles, although it now appears it probably predated him. He lived in a community where numbers were venerated as much for their spiritual qualities as for their mathematical ones. His elevation of numbers as the essence of the world made him the towering primogenitor of Greek mathematics, essentially the beginning of mathematics as we know it now. And, famously, he didn't eat beans.
Hypatia (cAD360-415)
Hypatia (375415AD), a Greek woman mathematician and philosopher. Photograph: © Bettmann/Corbis Women are under-represented in mathematics, yet the history of the subject is not exclusively male. Hypatia was a scholar at the library in Alexandria in the 4th century CE. Her most valuable scientific legacy was her edited version of Euclid's The Elements, the most important Greek mathematical text, and one of the standard versions for centuries after her particularly horrific death: she was murdered by a Christian mob who stripped her naked, peeled away her flesh with broken pottery and ripped apart her limbs.
Girolamo Cardano (1501 -1576)
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), mathematician, astrologer and physician. Photograph: SSPL/Getty Italian polymath for whom the term Renaissance man could have been invented. A doctor by profession, he was the author of 131 books. He was also a compulsive gambler. It was this last habit that led him to the first scientific analysis of probability. He realised he could win more on the dicing table if he expressed the likelihood of chance events using numbers. This was a revolutionary idea, and it led to probability theory, which in turn led to the birth of statistics, marketing, the insurance industry and the weather forecast.
Leonhard Euler (1707- 1783)
Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). Photograph: Science and Society Picture Library The most prolific mathematician of all time, publishing close to 900 books. When he went blind in his late 50s his productivity in many areas increased. His famous formula eiπ + 1 = 0, where e is the mathematical constant sometimes known as Euler's number and i is the square root of minus one, is widely considered the most beautiful in mathematics. He later took an interest in Latin squares – grids where each row and column contains each member of a set of numbers or objects once. Without this work, we might not have had sudoku.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS Known as the prince of mathematicians, Gauss made significant contributions to most fields of 19th century mathematics. An obsessive perfectionist, he didn't publish much of his work, preferring to rework and improve theorems first. His revolutionary discovery of nonEuclidean space (that it is mathematically consistent that parallel lines may diverge) was found in his notes after his death. During his analysis of astronomical data, he realised that measurement error produced a bell curve – and that shape is now known as a Gaussian distribution.
Georg Cantor (1845-1918)
Georg Ferdinand Cantor (1845-1918), German mathematician. Photograph: © Corbis Of all the great mathematicians, Cantor most perfectly fulfils the (Hollywood) stereotype that a genius for maths and mental illness are somehow inextricable. Cantor's most brilliant insight was to develop a way to talk about mathematical infinity. His set theory lead to the
counter-intuitive discovery that some infinities were larger than others. The result was mindblowing. Unfortunately he suffered mental breakdowns and was frequently hospitalised. He also became fixated on proving that the works of Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon.
Paul Erdös (1913-1996)
Paul Erdos (191396). Erdös lived a nomadic, possession-less life, moving from university to university, from colleague's spare room to conference hotel. He rarely published alone, preferring to collaborate – writing about 1,500 papers, with 511 collaborators, making him the secondmost prolific mathematician after Euler. As a humorous tribute, an "Erdös number" is given to mathematicians according to their collaborative proximity to him: No 1 for those who have authored papers with him; No 2 for those who have authored with mathematicians with an Erdös No 1, and so on.
John Horton Conway (b1937)
John Horton Conway.
The Liverpudlian is best known for the serious maths that has come from his analyses of games and puzzles. In 1970, he came up with the rules for the Game of Life, a game in which you see how patterns of cells evolve in a grid. Early computer scientists adored playing Life, earning Conway star status. He has made important contributions to many branches of pure maths, such as group theory, number theory and geometry and, with collaborators, has also come up with wonderful-sounding concepts like surreal numbers, the grand antiprism and monstrous moonshine.
Grigori Perelman (b1966)
Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman. Photograph: © EPA/Corbis Perelman was awarded $1m last month for proving one of the most famous open questions in maths, the Poincaré Conjecture. But the Russian recluse has refused to accept the cash. He had already turned down maths' most prestigious honour, the Fields Medal in 2006. "If the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed," he reportedly said. The Poincaré Conjecture was first stated in 1904 by Henri Poincaré and concerns the behaviour of shapes in three dimensions. Perelman is currently unemployed and lives a frugal life with his mother in St Petersburg.
Terry Tao (b1975)
Terry Tao. Photograph: Reed Hutchinson/UCLA An Australian of Chinese heritage who lives in the US, Tao also won (and accepted) the Fields Medal in 2006. Together with Ben Green, he proved an amazing result about prime numbers – that you can find sequences of primes of any length in which every number in the sequence is a fixed distance apart. For example, the sequence 3, 7, 11 has three primes spaced 4 apart. The sequence 11, 17, 23, 29 has four primes that are 6 apart. While sequences like this of any length exist, no one has found one of more than 25 primes, since the primes by then are more than 18 digits long.
Pythagoras Biography Born: c. 575 B.C.E. Samos, Greece Died: c. 495 B.C.E. Metapontum Greek philosopher, scientist, and religious scholar
The Greek philosopher, scientist, and religious teacher Pythagoras developed a school of thought that accepted the age of the soul into another body and established many influential mathematical and philosophical theories.
Early life Born on the island of Samos, off Greece, in the Mediterranean Sea, Pythagoras was the son of Mnesarchus. After studying in Greece, he fled to southern Italy to escape the harsh rule of
Polycrates (died c. 522 B.C.E. ), who came to power about 538 B.C.E. Pythagoras is said to have traveled to Egypt and Babylon during this time. Pythagoras and his followers became politically powerful in Croton in southern Italy, where Pythagoras had established a school for his newly formed sect, or group of followers. It is probable that the Pythagoreans took positions in the local government in order to lead men to the pure life that was directed by their teachings. Eventually, however, a rival group launched an attack on the Pythagoreans at a gathering of the sect, and the group was almost completely destroyed. Pythagoras either had been forced to leave Croton or had left voluntarily shortly before this attack. He died in Metapontum early in the fifth century B.C.E.
Mathematical teachings The Pythagoreans presented as fact the dualism (that life is controlled by opposite forces) between Limited and Unlimited. It
Pythagoras. Reproduced by permission of the Corbis Corporation . was probably Pythagoras who declared that numbers could uncover the secrets of the universe, limiting and giving shape to matter (anything that takes up space). His study of musical intervals, leading to the discovery that the chief intervals can be expressed in numerical ratios (relationships between numbers) between the first four integers (positive whole numbers), also led to the theory that the number ten, the sum of the first four integers, embraced the whole nature of number. So great was the Pythagoreans' respect for the "Tetractys of the Decad" (the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4) that they swore their oaths (promises) by it rather than by the gods, as was normal during his day. Pythagoras may have discovered the theorem which still bears his name (in right triangles [triangle with one angle equal to 90 degrees], the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other sides) Regardless of their sources, the Pythagoreans did important work in extending the body of mathematical knowledge.
As a more general outline, the Pythagoreans presented the two contraries (opposites), Limited and Unlimited, as ultimate principles, or truths. Numerical oddness and evenness are equated with Limited and Unlimited, as are one and plurality (many), right and left, male and female, motionlessness and movement, straight and crooked, light and darkness, and good and bad. It is not clear whether an ultimate One, or Monad, was presented as the cause of the two categories.
Cosmological views The Pythagoreans, as a result of their religious beliefs and careful study of mathematics, developed a cosmology (dealing with the structures of the universe) which differed in some important respects from the world views at the time, the most important of which was their view of the Earth as a sphere which circled the center of the universe. It is not known how much of this theory was credited to Pythagoras himself. The mathematical knowledge carried out by Pythagoras and his followers would have been enough to make him an important figure in the history of Western thought. However, his religious sect and the self-discipline and dedication which he taught, embracing as it did a vast number of ancient beliefs, make him one of the great teachers of religion in the ancient Greek world. Full name: Pythagoras Birth: c. 580 BC – 572 BC Death: c. 500 BC – 490 BC Main interests: Metaphysics, Music, Mathematics, Ethics, Politics He is best known for the Pythagorean theorem, which bears his name. Known as "the father of numbers", Pythagoras made influential contributions to mathematics, philosophy and religious teaching in the late 6th century BC. Pythagoras is commonly given credit for discovering the Pythagorean theorem, a theorem in geometry that states that in a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle), c, is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, b and a—that is, a² + b² = c². Because legend and obfuscation cloud his work even more than with the other pre-Socratics, one can say little with confidence about his life and teachings. We do know that Pythagoras and his students believed that everything was related to mathematics and that numbers were the ultimate reality and, through mathematics, everything could be predicted and measured in rhythmic patterns or cycles. According to Iamblichus, Pythagoras once said that "number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and demons