-
300 BCE
Euclid (300BC)
He is also called Euclid of Alexandria to distinguish him from Euclid of Megara, another greek mathematician. His Elements is influential in the history of mathematics, serving as the main textbook for teaching mathematics (especially geometry) from the time of its publication until the early 20th century. Euclid's elements showed us the mathematical technique used by ancient greek mathematicians. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, and number theory. -
René Descartes (1596–1650)
He was a mathematician, scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician. In mathematics, he developed the famous Cartesian system. He also developed a “rule of signs” technique for determining the number of positive or negative real roots of a polynomial, we learnt this in our math class. -
Pierre de Fermat (1607 – 1665)
He was a French lawyer, and a mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of differential calculus, and his research into number theory. He is best known for his Fermat's principle and his Fermat's Last Theorem in number theory. -
Isaac Newton (1642 – 1726)
An English and one of the greatest mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, theologians, and authors. He was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge and got his MA there. Since this is about mathematics, let’s go through his mathematical contributions only. He has come up with the infinitesimal calculus, methods of fluent, and generalized Binomial Theorem, etc. The most important contribution is infinitesimal calculus which is widely used nowadays. -
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss(1777 – 1855)
He was a German mathematician and physicist. He had a significant influence in math & science, and is ranked among history's most influential mathematicians. Gauss was three years old when he corrected a math error his father made. When he was seven, he solved a famous arithmetic series problem (1 + 2 + ..+ 99+100) faster than anyone else in his class. He is well known for his contributions to number theory, geometry, probability theory, geodesy, planetary astronomy, and the theory of functions. -
Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789 – 1857)
Augustin-Louis was enrolled in the best secondary school in Paris at that time. He was a brilliant student who won many prizes in Latin and the humanities. However, he chose an engineering career. He made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He was one of the first to state and rigorously prove theorems of calculus, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra of earlier authors. -
Ada Lovelace(1815 – 1852)
An English mathematician. When she was seventeen, her mathematical abilities began to emerge, and her interest in mathematics dominated the majority of her adult life. She is known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognize that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. -
Bernhard Riemann(1826 – 1866)
A German mathematician who is considered as one of the greatest mathematicians from all time. He has made contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In 1846, his father sent him to the University of Göttingen, where he began studying mathematics under Carl Friedrich Gauss. The most famous work of his is the Riemann hypothesis. It is a conjecture that the Riemann zeta function has its zeros only at the negative even integers and complex numbers with real part ½. -
Jules Henri Poincaré (1854 –1912)
A French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He studied at the École des Mines in mathematics and mining engineering. He made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré was the first one to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. -
David Hilbert (1862 – 1943)
He was a German mathematician. He enrolled at the University of Königsberg, and remained at the University of Königsberg as a senior lecturer from 1886 to 1895. He discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, such as invariant theory, the calculus of variations, commutative algebra, algebraic number theory, the foundations of geometry, spectral theory of operators and its application to integral equations, and mathematical physics. -
Georges Gonthier (1869~?)
He is a Canadian computer scientist and one of the leading practitioners in formal mathematics. He led the formalization of the four color theorem and Feit–Thompson proof of the odd-order theorem. He graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and received his PhD at the University of Paris. Now, he is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge. -
Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877 – 1947)
An English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis. He studied in Trinity College, Cambridge. After only two years of preparation under his coach, Robert Alfred Herman, he was fourth in the Mathematics Tripos examination. He earned his M.A in 1903, which was the highest academic degree at English universities at that time. He is usually known by those non-mathematicians for his 1940 essay: A Mathematician's Apology. -
John Edensor Littlewood (1885 – 1977)
He was a British mathematician. He worked on topics relating to analysis, number theory, and differential equations. He entered the University of Cambridge, studying in Trinity College. He worked as a Richardson Lecturer in the University of Manchester and returned to Cambridge in 1910, where he remained for the rest of his career. -
Edward Norton Lorenz (1917 – 2008)
He was an American mathematician and meteorologist. He is best known as the founder of modern chaos theory, the mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are sensitive to initial conditions. He discovered the theory by accident when he tried to recheck his data. Instead of running the data from the beginning, he re-ran the data he obtained from the middle way of his first trial. Out of expect, the outcome is distinct from the previous one. Thus, the Chaos theory was born. -
David Gale (1921 – 2008)
American mathematician, economist and a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Math at Princeton University. His contributions to mathematical economics include an early proof of the existence of competitive equilibrium and solution of the n-dimensional Ramsey problem. His Gale–Shapley algorithm is now being applied in New York and Boston public school systems in assigning students to schools. This work was awarded in 2012 for Nobel economics prize. -
Lloyd Shapley (1923 – 2016)
He was a student at Harvard. He served in the United States Army Air Corps in Chengdu, China and received the Bronze Star decoration for breaking the Soviet weather code. After the war, Shapley returned to Harvard and graduated with an A.B. in math. He then went to Princeton University where he received a PhD. His contributions are huge in mathematical economics and especially game theory. He is generally considered one of the most important contributors to the development of game theory. -
Benoit Mandelbrot (1924 – 2010)
He was a Polish-born French-American mathematician. While he was a child, his family emigrated to France from Poland. After WW2 ended, he studied math, graduating from universities in Paris and the States and receiving a master's degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. After that, he began his career at IBM, and then taught at Harvard University. He was the one to use computer graphics to display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovery of the Mandelbrot set. -
Harold Cohen (1928 – 2016)
He was a British artist who was noted as the creator of AARON, a computer program designed to produce art autonomously. He went to the states to give a speech at the University of California, but he was given the rank of professor and stayed for nearly three decades there. He also served as director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at University of California, San Diego from 1992~1998. -
Wolfgang Haken (1928~?)
He is a mathematician who specializes in topology, particularly in 3-manifolds. He was born in Berlin. He earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel and married Anna-Irmgard von Bredow, who earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the same university. -
Frank Rosenblatt (1928 – 1971)
He was notable in the field of artificial intelligence.
After graduating from The Bronx High School of Science in, he attended Cornell University, where he obtained his A.B. in 1950 and his Ph.D. in 1956.
He is best known for the Perceptron, an electronic device which was constructed in accordance with biological principles and showed an ability to learn. He received international recognition for the Perceptron. -
Michael Atiyah (1929 – 2019)
A British-Lebanese mathematician. He grew up in Sudan and Egypt but spent most of his academic life in the UK and US at the University of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study. He was the President of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton Institute, Trinity College, the University of Leicester, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is known for the Atiyah–Singer index theorem which is used in counting the number of independent solutions to differential equations. -
Kenneth Appel (1932 – 2013)
An American mathematician. He received his bachelor's degree from Queens College and attended the University of Michigan where he earned his M.A after serving in the army. In 1976, with colleague Wolfgang Haken at the University of Illinois. They solved one of the most famous problems in mathematics, the four-color theorem. They proved that any two-dimensional map, with certain limitations, can be filled in with four colors without any adjacent "countries" sharing the same color. -
Doron Zeilberger(1950~?)
An Israeli mathematician. He received his doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is a Board of Governors Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University now. He made contributions to combinatorics, hypergeometric identities, and q-series. He gave the first proof of the alternating sign matrix conjecture, which known for its content and the fact that he recruited a hundred volunteers to check it. He also proved the q-TSPP conjecture with Manuel Kauers and Christoph Koutschan in 2011. -
Andrew Wiles( 1953~?)
An English mathematician and a Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in number theory. He is known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem. He came across Fermat's Last Theorem on his way home from school when he was 10 years old. Fascinated by this theorem that is so easy even he, a ten-year old could understand but had proven by no one, he decided to be the first person to prove it. Although due to the limited knowledge he quickly gave up this daydream, he did make it when he grew up. -
Thomas Callister Hales (1958~?)
An American mathematician working in representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification.
He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. In 1998, Hales submitted his paper on the computer-aided proof of the Kepler conjecture, a centuries-old problem in discrete geometry which states that the most space-efficient way to pack spheres is in a tetrahedron shape. -
David Hilton Wolpert (1961~?)
He is an American mathematician, computer scientist and physicist. He is a professor at Santa Fe Institute and has received a lot of awards. His name is particularly associated with a group of theorems in computer science known as "no free lunch". David Wolpert took a B.A. in Physics at Princeton University (1984), then attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he took the degrees of M.A. and PhD. -
Grigori Perelman (1966~?)
He is a Russian mathematician. When he was in high school, he won a gold medal in the international mathematical Olympiad, an international competition for high school students. He continued as a student of The School of Mathematics and Mechanics at the Leningrad State University.
He made influential contributions to the study of Alexandrov spaces. He also proved the soul conjecture in Riemannian geometry, which had been an open problem for the previous 20 years. -
Simon Colton (1973~?)
British computer scientist, now working as Professor at Queen Mary University of London and Monash University. Previously, he led the Computational Creativity Research Groups at Goldsmiths, University of London and Imperial College. He graduated from the University of Durham in Math and a PhD in AI from the University of Edinburgh. He is the driving force behind thepaintingfool.com, an artificial intelligence generating artworks that he hopes one day will be accepted as an artist. -
David Silver(1976~?)
David Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and was lead researcher on AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar. He graduated from Cambridge University and returned to academia in 2004 at the University of Alberta to study for a PhD on reinforcement learning. He was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, and subsequently became a professor at University College London. -
Ian Cheng (1984~?)
He graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a dual degree in cognitive science and art. He then attended Columbia University and earned a MFA. He is an American artist known for his live simulations that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change. His work has been widely exhibited, including MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art, etc. Most recently, he has been developing BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI creature. -
Ian Goodfellow (1985~?)
He is a researcher working in machine learning, currently employed at Apple as its director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group. He was previously employed at Google. He has made several contributions to the field of deep learning. Goodfellow obtained his B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University and his PhD in machine learning from the Université de Montréal. -
Efim Zelmanov (1955~?)
A Russian-American mathematician. He entered Novosibirsk State University when he was 17. He obtained a doctoral degree at Novosibirsk State University and moved to the US. Now he is a professor at the University of California, San Diego and the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. He is known for his work on combinatorial problems in non-associative algebra and group theory, including his solution of the restricted Burnside problem.