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Period: 569 BCE to 500 BCE
Pythagoras
From Greece. Math: Gave us the Pythagorean Theorem. Life: Pythagoras had a quasi-religious society built around the reverence of numbers. He once said, “Numbers rule the universe.” He died in the fire of his school when a mob burned him alive in it. -
Period: 325 BCE to 265 BCE
Euclid
From Alexandria. Math: Laid the foundations for Geometry in his 13 books called Elements. He constructed all of geometry off of four postulates. Life: He once said to Ptolemy (a famous intellectual of the time), “There is no royal road to Geometry.” It’s not known how he died, but some say that he never existed, and was just a name many mathematicians went by. -
Period: 287 BCE to 212 BCE
Archimedes
From Syracuse, Sicily. Math: Invented the compound pulley. Was asked to use his understanding to create instruments of war. Life: He was charged by the king to find out if the king’s crown was made fully of gold or not. He figured out a way of telling this using the crown’s density. Upon realizing this, he ran naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!” meaning “I’ve found it!”
He died when he commanded a soldier not to disturb his circles which he’d drawn; the soldier got mad and slew him. -
Period: Jan 1, 780 to Dec 31, 850
Al-Khwarizmi
From Baghdad (Iraq) Math: Created Base-10 numbers and arithmetic. He used no symbols in his math; everything was written out in words. Life: Lived during a time of great culture and intellectual disciplines within Islam. He worked at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. He created algebra, and gave it its name. The name comes from “al-jabr.” Jabr is a word that means the balance that’s maintained in an equation when the same quantity is added to both sides. -
Period: Jan 1, 1510 to Dec 31, 1576
Cardano
From Italy. Math: He was the first to write about probability, and the first to discover complex numbers. Life: He understood probability so well, he supported himself by gambling, and won more than he lost. He had a tumultuous family; two of his sons went to jail, one for poisoning his wife to death, and the other for constantly stealing. Cardano predicted the date of his death to the day. He fulfilled the prophecy by committing suicide. -
Period: to
Descartes
From France. Math: He combined algebra and geometry, using graphs. He gave us the Cartesian coordinate system. Life: He went to college as an 8 year old, for twelve years. His whole life, he stayed in bed until 11am. He got a law degree, went to military college, joined the Bavarian Army, and did philosophy. He moved to Stockholm to tutor Queen Christina of Sweden. This broke his habit of sleeping in; she demanded 5am classes. This led to Descartes contracting pneumonia and dying. -
Period: to
Newton
From England. Math: When in university, it was closed for the Summer of 1665 because of the plague. Newton was out of school for two years, and in this time, created the subject of Calculus. He gave us the Three Laws of motion. Life: He had a huge dispute with Leibniz over who invented calculus first, since they invented it at the same time. He was knighted by Queen Anne, becoming Sir Isaac Newton. He died quietly in old age. -
Period: to
Euler
From Switzerland. Math: Gave us e, Euler’s Number, 2.71828…. Life: Went to college as a 14 year old. Worked in St. Petersburg (Russia) and Berlin (Germany). He lost his sight, but kept working. Half of his scientific work came after going blind, including his work on optics. He died of a brain hemorrhage with the cry, “I am dying.” -
Period: to
Sophie Germain
From France. Math: She did work in number theory, elasticity, and made important advances on Fermat’s Last Theorem. Life: She was kept home from school because of the French revolution, and read mathematics books in her dad’s library. She became interested in math when she learned about the way Archimedes died. She is the most famous female mathematician. -
Period: to
Gauss
From Germany. Math: Contributed a huge amount of progress to mathematics, earning himself the title of the Prince of Mathematics. Life: In school, he was tasked by teacher to sum the integers 1 through 100. He was expected to take a while, but he did it quickly. He added 100+1, 99+2, 98+3, etc, which all equal 101. There’s 100 of these pairs, so he multiplied 100*101, then divided by two to get the answer, 5050. He was 7 years old. -
Period: to
Riemann
From Germany. Math: He reinvented Geometry, providing a completely different method for geometric work. Albert Einstein used Riemann’s ideas in his general relativity. Life: He was taught by Gauss himself. As a student, he studied classical subjects; Hebrew and theology, because he was the son of a Lutheran minister. His dad wanted him to major in theology, but he begged to study mathematics, and his father allowed this. -
Period: to
Poincaré
From France. Math: He’s most well-known for giving us the subject of Topology. He contributed to optics, electricity, telegraphy, capillarity, elasticity, thermodynamics, potential theory, quantum theory, relativity, and cosmology.
Life: His cousin was the president of France during WWI. He was pretty unorganized, in his papers and lectures. He believed in separate roles for intuition and rigor; the first finds ideas, and the second establishes them. -
Period: to
Emmy Noether
A Jewish woman from Germany. Math: She gave us the subject of Abstract Algebra. Life: She played piano, liked dancing, and enjoyed attending parties. She couldn’t get respect from the intellectual community, until she started publishing papers, which quickly gave her a well established reputation. She was dismissed from her post at a university in 1933, because she was Jewish. She moved to America and taught at a school outside Philadelphia. -
Period: to
Alan Turing
From England. Math: He didn’t invent cryptology, he ushered it into the modern age. He helped form modern logic. During WWII, he cracked the German codes (the enigma machine) by building the Bombe machine. It was said that his work in this saved more lives in WWII than any other one person. Life: He was very athletic, and ran almost at the Olympic level. In 1952, he was arrested and convicted for violation of the British homosexuality statutes. He died of poisoning two years later.