Here is a chronological list of a few mathematicians and scientists whose towering
achievements have helped shape the Science of their times and ours. [ Nominate ]

Giants of Science

Thales of Miletus, engineer (c. 624-546 BC)

First sage of Greece, he founded classical geometry and natural philosophy. Alchemists claimed him as one of theirs. The Theorem of Thales (one of two) is about two triangles with parallel sides: The pyramid's shadow is to the pyramid what a man's shadow is to the man [wow].

Earliest Mathematics | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 569-475 BC)

In Croton, he founded the mystic cult of the Phythagoreans, whose initiated members called themselves mathematikoi. They are credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean Theorem (itself known to the Chaldeans 1000 years before).

Tetractys | Constant of Pythagoras | MacTutor| Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-370 BC)

The most prominent atomist (the last presocratic school, founded by his teacher Leucippus. Student of Zeno and proponent of the law of causality). He argued that all matter consists of indivisible atoms moving in the void. The alchemist Bolus of Mendes used his name as pseudonym.

Hippocrates of Cos, physician (c. 450-377 BC)

Revolutionary founder of Western medicine. An asclepiad, said to be a direct descendant (17 or 19 generations) of the legendary Aesclepius, Hippocrates studied philosophy under Democritus and learned rudiments of medicine from his father, Heraclides, and from Herodicus of Selymbria.

The 4 Humors of Hippocrates | Wikipedia | IEP | NNDB

Archytas of Tarentum (428-347 BC)

A statesman taught by Philolaus (student of Pythagoras) he taught Eudoxus. Archytas considered surfaces generated by rotating curves and could double the cube by intersecting three of those (defining Archytas' curve in the process).

Math Men | MacTutor | Wikipedia

Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-355 BC)

His definition of the comparison between ratios of (possibly irrational) numbers, as recorded by Euclid, would inspire the rigorous definition of real numbers by Dedekind in 1872. He invented the method of exhaustion that Archimedes built on. He was the first Greek scholar to map the stars.

Spheres of Eudoxus by J.L.E Dreyer | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | NNDB

Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 BC)

He was the undisputed authority on natural philosophy for two millenia or so. The lack of discussion of that authority hindered the development of natural Science more than any other single factor, with the possible exception of Church doctrine (of which some Aristotelian concepts were a part).

Euclid of Alexandria (c. 325-265 BC)

Father of axiomatic geometry and author of the most enduring textbook in the history of mathematics: The Elements. His presentation of the mathematics of his times would become the centerpiece of mathematical teaching for more than 2000 years.

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Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287-212 BC)

A native and resident of Syracuse, Archimedes studied in Alexandria and maintained relations with Alexandrian scholars. Although he became famous for designing war machines, this early physicist was, above all, an outstanding mathematician.

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-194 BC)

Eratosthenes headed the Library of Alexandria after the death of Callimachus. In number theory, he is remembered for the Sieve of Eratosthenes. He also came up with the first accurate measurement of the circumference of the Earth.

Apollonius of Perga (262-190 BC)

Apollonius named and studied the conic sections. He found that a circle consists of all points M whose distances to two foci (I,J) are in a fixed ratio (e.g., 2/3). He said that planets revolve around the Sun and that the Earth itself might as well be thought of as moving, like planets do.

Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 190-126 BC)

Hipparch founded trigonometry (table of chords, spherical coordinates) and discovered the precession of the equinoxes (130 BC). The nova of 134 BC inspired him to compile a catalog of 1080 stars. His lunar and solar models could predict eclipses.

Pliny the Elder, encyclopedist (AD 23-79)

Gaius Plinius Secundus was a public official who wrote a lot. The 37 books of Historia Naturalis (AD 77) present, in an anthropocentric way, everything the Romans knew about the natural world. In this, Pliny cites nearly 4000 authors.

Historia Naturalis (Bill Thayer) = The Natural History (Bostock & Riley) | Wikipedia | Weisstein | NNDB

Dioscorides, pharmacologist (c. AD 40-90)

Pedanius Dioscorides was the Greek author of the first major pharmacopeia (which never went out of print and remained authoritative for over 1500 years). The 5 volumes of De Materia Medica (AD 70) present about 600 plants.

De Materia Medica | Greek Medicine | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Ptolemy of Alexandria (c. AD 87-165)

Claudius Ptolemaeus was a Roman citizen who wrote in Greek. His first name is unknown (it's been guessed to be Tiberius). The geocentric system presented in his Almagest (c. AD 150) dominated astronomy for many centuries.

Almagest | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | NNDB

Galen of Pergamos, physician (AD 129-217)

A Roman citizen of Greek ethnicity, he started out as physician to the gladiators. He was so prolific (10 million words) that his surviving works (30%) represent nearly half of the extant literature of ancient Greece. His thinking dominated medicine for more than a thousand years.

Britannica | Wikipedia | NNDB | IEP

Mary the Jewess, alchemist (3^rd century AD)

Earliest female experimentalist on record (signing Miriam the prophetess, sister of Moses) she invented the tribikos still and the balneum Mariae (named after her). F. Hoefer also credits her for muriatic acid (HCl). In Alexandria, she reluctantly initiated Zosimos of Panopolis (a gentile).

Wikipedia | Maria Prophetissa | Opus Mulierum | Axiom of Maria | Chrysopoeia (1964) by Leonora Carrington

Pappus of Alexandria (c. AD 290-350)

The theorem of Pappus (generalized by Pascal in 1639) is a fundamental theorem of projective geometry. The name is also used for the two centroid theorems published by Paul Guldin (1577-1643) in Centrobaryca (1635) pertaining to the surface area and the volume of a solid of revolution.

Wikipedia | MacTutor | Freebase | Encyclopedia Britannica

Hypatia, neoplatonist martyr (c. AD 360-415)

Daughter of the mathematician Theon (c. 335-405) last librarian of Alexandria, who raised her like a boy. Her scientific teaching was perceived as pagan. Hypatia was ambushed and skinned alive by a mob of Christian fanatics. Her murder marks the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Wikipedia | MacTutor | Freebase | NNDB

Geber, experimental chemist (c. AD 721-815)

Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan al Azdi was born in Tus (Persia) but the Arabs claim him as one of their own. Geber (or Jabir) made remarkable scientific advances in practical chemistry but also produced eponymous gibberish on occult alchemy.

al-Khwarizmi, Algorismus (c. AD 783, fl.847)

Al-jabr (transposition from one side of an equation to the other) is the technique which gave algebra its name. The term is from the title of the masterpiece published around 810 by Abu Abdallah Muhammed bin Musa al Khwarizmi.

Decimal numeration | Quadratic formula | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Weisstein

Leonardo Pisano Bigollo Fibonacci (1170-1250)

As a teenager in Algeria, Fibonacci learned the Hindu-Arabic decimal system that he would advocate in Europe. In Liber Abaci (1202) he discussed many computational puzzles, including one about the Fibonacci sequence...

The Fibonacci Series | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

William of Ockham, friar (c.1288-1348)

Arguably, the foremost Medieval logician. His enduring contribution to natural philosophy is the "principle of parsimony" known as Occam's Razor (the simplest explanation compatible with observations is preferred).

MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Nicole Oresme, bishop (1323-1382)

Nicolas Oresme is credited with the introduction of fractional exponents and the graphing of functions. He also established the divergence of the harmonic series. Oresme anticipated analytic geometry, the law of free fall and chemical structures...

MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Université de Caen

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

Mikolaj Kopernik attended Krakow, Bologna, Padua and Ferrara. Thanks to his uncle, he became a canon at Frauenberg (1497) where he would have an observatory. Around 1514, he gave an heliocentric explanation to planetary retrograde motion.

Paracelsus, physician (1493-1541)

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim chose the pseudonym Paracelsus in honor of the encyclopedist Celsus. He is the first systematic botanist. He named zinc (1526) and revolutonized medicine (without freeing it from superstition) by using mineral chemicals.

The dose makes the poison | Alphabet of the Magi | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576)

Girolamo Cardano (Cardan to the French)

Ars Magna | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | NNDB

Ambroise Paré, surgeon (1510-1590)

Ambroise Paré was a royal military surgeon. On one occasion on the battlefield, he had to use a makeshift ointment. He observed that the soldiers so treated recovered much better than those who underwent the formerly "recommended" treatment (i.e., burning wounds with oil).

Wikipedia | Britannica | NNDB

Andries Wijtinck van Wesele (1514-1564)

Breaking with the precepts of Galen, Andreas Vesalius Bruxellensis revolutionized medicine in 1543 with the first modern book on human anatomy, based on the detailed observations he made during the dissections that he carried out in front of medical students at the University of Padua.

De humani corporis fabrica (1543) | Wikipedia | NNDB

François Viète (1540-1603)

His name is also spelled Viette (latin: Franciscus Vieta). Viète pioneered modern algebraic notations, where known constants and unknown quantities are represented by letters. The trigonometric law of tangents (c. 1580) is due to him.

Catholic Encyclopedia | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Tycho Brahe, astronomer (1546-1601)

Tyge Ottesen Brahe was from the high Danish nobility. His Uraniborg observatory, on Hven island, cost 1% of the state budget but allowed precise (naked-eye) observations of planetary positions which made possible the work of Kepler.

MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Galileo Project

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Using his own pulse as a timer, Galileo discovered the pendulum isochronism in 1581. He found that all bodies fall with the same acceleration and declared mechanical laws valid for all observers in uniform motion. He made the first telescopic observations.

The Gaoileo Project (Rice University) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

Kepler's precise calculations helped establish heliocentric astronomy. In 1609 and 1619, he published his famous 3 laws of planetary motion. He studied optics, polyhedra, logarithms, etc. Arguably, he paved the road to Calculus.

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William Harvey, physician (1578-1657)

William Harvey started modern experimental medicine with his discovery of the circulation of the blood. He had been a student at Padua, where the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) had started encouraging students to observe rather than conform to the precepts of Galen.

Encyclopedia of Science by David Darling | Wikipedia | NNDB | BBC

René Descartes (1596-1650)

Descartes attended the famous Jesuit college of La Flèche from 1607 to 1615. He met his scientific mentor Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637) in 1618. He introduced cartesian geometry in one of three appendices to Discours sur la méthode (1637).

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Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)

Fermat attended Toulouse and Bordeaux, got a law degree from Orléans and purchased an office at the parlement of Toulouse in 1631. He pursued investigations in mathematics and physics in his spare time (his judicial work suffered).

Blaise Pascal, philosopher (1623-1662)

At age 19, he built a celebrated mechanical calculator. In 1647, Pascal thought of using a Torricelli barometer as an altimeter, which established experimentally (1648) the origin of atmospheric pressure. The SI unit of pressure (Pa) is named after him.

Pascal's hexagram theorem (1639) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Takakazu Seki [Kowa] (1642-1708)

The Japanese Newton. Second son of a Samurai warrior, he was adopted by a noble technocrat (Gorozaemon SEKI ) whose name he took. Some of Seki's discoveries predate their Western counterparts: Determinants (1683) Bernoulli numbers, etc. He taught Katahiro TAKEBE (1664-1739).

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669. FRS in 1672. Publishes Principia in 1687. Retires from research in 1693. Warden (1696) then Master (1699) of the Royal Mint. President of the Royal Society from 1703. Knighted in 1705.

MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

A major philosopher and a polymath, Leibniz invented differential calculus independently of Newton. He introduced a consistent notation for integrals and infinitesimals (1675). Unlike d'Alembert, Leibniz never thought of derivatives as limits.

Against Atomism | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

At the same time as Watson (1746) Franklin formulated the law of conservation of charge by positing opposite signs for resinous (-) and vitreous (+) electricity.

One of Franklin's many famous quotes | Electric Kite (1752) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749)

At 19, Gabrielle-Emilie de Breteuil married the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chastellet. She was the lover of Voltaire whom she and her husband protected in their château. Maupertuis had initiated her to Science at 27 and she would advocate the concept of energy introduced by Leibniz.

Breteuil ring in the French West Indies | Britannica | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)

He solved the Basel Problem in 1735. The most prolific mathematician of all times, Euler became totally blind in 1771. He still produced nearly half of his 866 works after 1766 (in St. Petersburg) with the help of several assistants, including Nicolaus Fuss (1755-1826) who joined in 1773.

Laura Bassi, physicist (1711-1778)

Gabriele Manfredi initiated her to higher mathematics and newtonian physics. In 1732 (at age 21) Laura Bassi became the second woman to earn a doctorate and the first to hold a teaching post at a European university (Bologna). She was finally named professor of physics there, in 1776.

Stanford (2012-01-04) | Tribute | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Mike Rendell

Jean-le-Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783)

Born illegitimately to Louis Camus des Touches "Canon" (1668-1726) and Claudine de Tencin, he was editor of the Encyclopedia. He founded analytical mechanics on a principle of virtual work and solved the wave equation. The d'Alembertian is a 4D operator.

Maria-Gaëtana Agnesi (1718-1799)

Child prodigy and author of the first mathematical book by a woman (1748). In 1750, she was appointed to the chair of mathematics at Bologna by

Pope Benedict XIV but she never went there (the first woman to hold a chair in Europe was thus Laura Bassi, in 1776).

Witch of Agnesi (curve) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | 1911 | NNDB

Henry Cavendish, FRS (1731-1810)

Absent-minded and pathologically shy, he could not talk to women at all. In 1766, Cavendish discovered what Lavoisier called hydrogen. In 1798, he measured Newton's Universal constant of gravity (G) to an accuracy of 1%.

Torsion balance of John Michell (1724-1793) | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Video (Roger Bowley) | NNDB

Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)

In 1744, Lagrange invented the calculus of variations (it's Euler who coined the name, in 1766). Lagrange soon applied it to analytical mechanics. He also invented Lagrange multipliers. In 1794, Polytechnique was founded. Lagrange became its first professor of analysis (till 1799).

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794)

Antoine Lavoisier founded quantitative chemistry by establishing that mass is conserved in any chemical transformation. He was infamously executed during the French Revolution because of his rôle as a tax collector.

Chemical Heritage Foundation | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Video Bio

Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827)

Introduced to mathematics in Caen by Christophe Gadbled and Pierre Le Canu, he was mentored by d'Alembert (in Paris) and became one of the most innovative and influential scientists ever (Laplacian, Laplace transform, etc.)

Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833)

Legendre was one of the greatest contributors to the mathematics of his times. Many concepts are named after him. At left is what seems to be his only extant portrait (it was found among 73 caricatures of members of the French academy of Sciences).

Legendre symbols & polynomials | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | 1911

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)

In January 1795, Joseph Fourier was the star trainee in the new Ecole normale de l'an III (the forerunner of ENS) as he was simultaneously teaching at Polytechnique. He is the founder of Harmonic Analysis (cf. Fourier transform).

PhD / ENS | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836)

Appointed professor of mathematics at Polytechnique in 1809. In september 1820, he discovered that like currents attract each other whereas opposite currents repel. The effect is now used to define the SI unit of current, which is named after him.

Ampere's law (1825 & 1861) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Sophie Germain (1776-1831)

At 13, the story of the death of Archimedes made her want to be a mathematician. She was 18 when Polytechnique opened (it was male-only until 1971) and made available Lagrange's lecture notes. This gave her a start to correspond with him and others (signing Monsieur LeBlanc at first).

Chladni patterns | Sophie Germain primes | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

At the age of 7, the Prince of Mathematics found instantly the sum (5050) of all integers from 1 to 100 (as the sum of 50 pairs, each adding up to 101). At age 19, his breakthrough about constructible polygons helped him choose a mathematical career.

Quadratic reciprocity | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Siméon Poisson (1781-1840; X1798)

Among his many mathematical contributions is a very abstract construct in analytical mechanics (Poisson Brackets, 1809) which helped Dirac formulate a precise correspondence between classical and quantum mechanics (Sunday, Sept. 20, 1925).

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François Arago (1786-1853; X1803)

He taught analysis and geometry at Polytechnique from 1810 to 1830, at the peak of his scientific productivity. A popular left-wing deputy elected in 1830, Arago became Minister of Marine and War in 1948 and was instrumental in abolishing slavery in the French Colonies (1848).

Augustin Fresnel (1788-1827; X1804)

Trained in Caen (1801-1804) then at Polytechnique. In 1821, Augustin Fresnel established (with Arago) that light is a transverse wave whose two orthogonal polarizations do not interfere with each other. He promoted the use of Fresnel lenses in lighthouses.

Born in Broglie, raised in Mathieu | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | NNDB

Augustin Cauchy (1789-1857; X1805)

A devout royalist, Cauchy wrote 789 papers in all areas of the mathematics and theoretical physics of his time. In 1821, his Cours d'analyse at Polytechnique put analysis on a rigorous footing. He originated the calculus of residues (1826) and complex analysis (1829).

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Michael Faraday, experimentalist (1791-1867)

In 1831, Faraday discovered the Law of Electromagnetic Induction, which made the electric era possible. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest experimentalists who ever lived. Yet, he had little or no grasp of higher mathematics.
Signature of
Michael Faraday

MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

He was Lucasian Professor (1828-1839) at Cambridge but never taught. He designed two computing machines: The Difference Engine (funded in 1822) was never completed. The more advanced Analytical Engine would have been the first true computer (Ada Lovelace wrote programs for it).

Babbage Pages | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829)

Niels Abel produced many brilliant results during a short life spent in poverty: Non-solvability of quintic equations by radicals, double periodicity of the elliptic functions, etc. An offer for his first professorship (at Berlin) arrived two days after he had succombed to tuberculosis.

Abel Prize (since 2003) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | FB

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804-1851)

An inspiring teacher, he was an outstanding and prolific creator of mathematics who has been likened to Euler. He introduced ¶ and Jacobians in 1841. Jacobi admired Poisson brackets and proved that they satisfy what's now called Jacobi's identity.

Ph.D. 1825 | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805-1859)

His full name was Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune-Dirichlet. He signed Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, (no hyphen) published as P.G.L. Dirichlet and was quoted as Lejeune-Dirichlet. He contributed to number theory, mechanics and analysis.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865)

Hamilton taught himself mathematics at the age of 17. In 1833, he devised a version of rational mechanics (based on co-called conjugate momenta) which helps clarify modern formulations of quantum mechanics. He invented quaternions in 1843.

DIT 2005 | MacTutor | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)

Against strong religious animosity (which lasts to this day in the US) Darwin established that the mechanism of natural selection was powerful enough to explain the evolution of the humblest ancient lifeforms into the most advanced modern ones, featuring extremely sophisticated organs.

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) | Wikipedia | NNDB | Facebook

Joseph Liouville (1809-1882; X1825)

Many of Liouville's 400+ papers include key contributions, like his conservation of Hamiltonian phase-measure. In 1836, he founded the Journal de mathématiques pures et appliquées and promoted the work of others, including Evariste Galois.

MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Karl Weierstrass, mathematician (1815-1897)

The father of analysis spent 15 years teaching secondary school before one paper earned him an honorary doctorate and a professorship. He gave the rigorous metric definition of limits and invented the concept of analytic continuation.

Hon. Dr. 1854 | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace (1815-1852)

Daughter and heiress of Lord Byron (the poet) whom she never knew. Ada was introduced by Mary Somerville to Charles Babbage on June 5, 1833. She then developped an intense interest in the mathematics of computation and is now regarded as the first computer programmer.

Women in Computer Science | Yale CS | MacTutor | Wikipedia | NNDB

Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev (1821-1894)

A Russian aristocrat fluent in French, he was home-schooled and tutored as a young boy by P.N. Pogorelski. Chebyshev made numerous contributions to number theory, algebra, analysis, mechanics, etc. By studying the totient function asymptotically, he proved Bertrand's postulate in 1850.

Arthur Cayley, mathematician (1821-1895)

He wrote 996 papers on many mathematical subjects (200 of these while praticing law, for 14 years). In 1858, Cayley established the Cayley-Hamilton theorem (a matrix is a zero of its characteristic polynomial) without proving it formally.

Charles Hermite (1822-1901; X1842)

After one year at Polytechnique, the military management dismissed him because of a congenitally deformed right leg. He returned as a teacher, five years later, and made key contributions to number theory, orthogonal polynomials and elliptic functions. He proved e transcendental in 1873.

Encyclopedia Britannica | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Louis Pasteur, microbiologist (1822-1895)

Louis Pasteur was a trained chemist who separated chiral isomers by sorting the different crystal they produced.

He proved the germ theory of infectious diseases and invented pasteurization.

Pasteur Institute | Encyclopedia Britannica | Wikipedia | NNDB | BBC

Leopold Kronecker, algebraist (1823-1891)

Famous for his credo "God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man", Kroneccker championed constructivism. He strongly opposed his former student Georg Cantor and the emerging nonconstructive Set Theory.

Ph.D. 1845 | Legendre symbols | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)

Born William Thomson, Lord Kelvin was knighted in 1866 and raised to the peerage in 1892 (Baron Kelvin of Largs). The SI unit of temperature is named after this mathematician noted for his engineering work (e.g., transatlantic telegraph).

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Bernhard Riemann, mathematician (1826-1866)

In 1851, his thesis introduced Riemann surfaces. Riemann's habilitation lecture on the foundations of geometry (1854) stunned even Gauss. Probing the distribution of primes with his zeta function, he stated the Riemann Hypothesis in 1859.

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James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)

In 1864, he devised Maxwell's equations which unify electricity and magnetism, by describing electromagnetic fields traveling at the speed of light. In 1866, Maxwell proposed (independently of Boltzmann) the Maxwell-Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases.

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Richard Dedekind, mathematician (1831-1916)

Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind was the last doctoral student of Gauss (1852) but he also learned much from Dirichlet after his doctorate. On 24 November 1858, he defined every real number as a Dedekind cut of rationals. In 1871, he introduced algebraic ideals.

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Dmitri Mendeleev, chemist (1834-1907)

In 1869, he presented a classification of chemical elements (based mostly on atomic masses) which showed periodic patterns in their chemical properties. He predicted the properties of 3 unknown elements which were discovered shortly thereafter: Ga (1871), Sc (1879) and Ge (1886).

Wikipedia | Weisstein | NNDB | Facebook

Ludwig Boltzmann, physicist (1844-1906)

A proponent of atomic theory and the father of statistical physics. We call Boltzmann's constant the coefficient of proportionality between entropy (in J/K) and the natural logarithm of the number W of allowed physical states.

Georg Cantor, mathematician (1845-1918)

Cantor's diagonal argument shows that the points of a line are not countable. More generally, Cantor's Theorem states that no function from a set to its powerset can possibly be surjective, which establishes an infinite sequence of increasing infinities.

Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891)

Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya was born Sonya Korvin-Krukovskaya. Weierstrass tutored her privately (1870-1874) and helped her

become the first female professor at a European university (Stockholm, 1889) since the days of Laura Bassi (1776) or Maria-Gaëtana Agnesi.

Ph.D. 1874 | Cauchy-Kovalevskaya theorem (1874) | MacTutor | WP | Weisstein

Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro (1853-1925)

In 1884, he started the investigations of quadratic differential forms which led him to invent tensor calculus (1884-1894). The text he published about that with Tullio Levi-Civita in 1900 would enable Einstein to formulate General Relativity in 1915.

Ph.D. 1873 | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein

Hendrik A. Lorentz, physicist (1853-1928)

Among the many contributions of H.A. Lorentz is the coordinate transformation which is the cornerstone of Special Relativity. In 1892, Lorentz proposed a theory of the electron (discovered by Perrin in 1895 and J.J. Thomson in 1898).

Nobel 1902 | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

J. Henri Poincaré (1854-1912; X1873)

Poincaré was the last universal genius and quintessential absent-minded professor (cf. Savant Cosinus comic strip). Poincaré conceived Special Relativity before Einstein did. His mathematical legacy includes chaos theory and topology.

MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Bruce Medal 1911 | Fans

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

At least 272 patents were awarded to Tesla in 25 countries. His work is the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power distribution. In 1960, the SI unit of magnetic induction (magnetic flux density) was named after him.

Master of Lightning | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Tesla coil | Fans

Max Planck, physicist (1858-1947)

Planck combined the formulas of Wien (UV) and Rayleigh (IR) into a unified expression for the blackbody spectrum. On Dec. 14, 1900, he justified it by proposing that exchanges of energy only occur in discrete lumps, dubbed quanta.

Nobel 1918 | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

David Hilbert, mathematician (1862-1943)

One of the most powerful mathematicians ever, David Hilbert gave a famous list of 23 unsolved problems in 1900. Quantum Theory is formally based on the complex normed vector spaces which are named after him.

Hilbert's List | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909)

Pioneering convex geometry, he proved an early version of the separation theorem (of Hahn-Banach) and called A+B the set of all sums with one addend in A and the other in B. The triangular inequality for the L^p norm (1896) and the relativistic scalar product (1908) are named after him.

Marie Curie, physical chemist (1867-1934)

Madame Curie (née Maria Salomea Sklodowska ) was the first woman to earn a Nobel prize and the first person to earn two. In 1898, she isolated two new elements (polonium and radium) by tracking their ionizing radiation, using the electrometer of Jacques and Pierre Curie (her husband).

Nobel 1903 (Physics) | Nobel 1911 (Chemistry) | Wikipedia | AIP | Facebook Fans

Elie Cartan, mathematician (1869-1951)

In 1913, Cartan established, from a purely geometrical standpoint, the relations that lead to the quantization of spin. He developed exterior calculus and published his full Theory of Spinors as a textbook in 1935.

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Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)

British physicist born in Nelson, New Zealand. His investigations of alpha and beta decay (which he so named) earned him a Nobel prize before he moved to Manchester, where he supervised the Geiger-Marsden experiment (1909) and inferred the planetary model of the atom (1911).

Nobel 1908 | Nuclear Physics | Wikipedia | Weisstein | John Campbell (NZ)

Lise Meitner, physical chemist (1878-1968)

A student of Ludwig Boltzmann, she became a collaborator of Otto Hahn who was awarded a Nobel prize (1944) for their joint work. With Otto Frisch (her nephew) Lise Meitner gave nuclear fission its name (Kernspaltung). She correctly explained the related mass defect (1938).

Otto Hahn's Nobel Lecture | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Meitnerium (1997)

Albert Einstein, physicist (1879-1955)

In 1905, Einstein published on Brownian motion (existence of atoms) the photoelectric effect (discovery of the photon) and his own Special Theory of Relativity, which he unified with gravity in 1915 by formulating the General Theory of Relativity. In 1916, he discovered what led to lasers.

Emmy Noether, mathematician (1882-1935)

Emmy Noether discovered the remarkable equivalence between symmetries in physical laws and conserved physical quantities (Noether's theorem, 1915). Her considerable legacy also includes three Isomorphism Theorems named after her (1927).

1918 Paper | MacTutor | Wikipedia | EmmyNoether.com | Facebook Fans

Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)

In 1913, Bohr started the quantum revolution with a model where the orbital angular momentum of an electron only has discrete values. He spearheaded the Copenhagen Interpretation which holds that quantum phenomena are inherently probabilistic.

Nobel 1922 | Wikipedia | Coat of Arms | Facebook Fans

"Peter" Hermann Weyl (1885-1955)

In 1908, Weyl obtained his doctorate in mathematics from Göttingen under Hilbert. He was enthralled by symmetry and other mathematical aspects of physics. In 1913, Weyl became a colleague of Einstein's at the ETH Zürich. He befriended Schrödinger in 1921.

Ph.D. 1908 | Symmetry (1952) | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

Erwin Schrödinger, physicist (1887-1961)

In 1926, Schrödinger matched observed quantum behavior with the properties of a continuous nonrelativistic wave obeying the Schrödinger Equation. In 1935, he challenged the Copenhagen Interpretation, with the famous tale of Schrödinger's cat.

Dublin | Nobel 1933 (lecture) | Wikipedia | MacTutor | FB

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)

Ramanujan lacked a formal mathematical education but, in 1913, a few of his early results managed to startle G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) who invited him to Cambridge in 1914. Ramanujan has left an unusual legacy of brilliant unconventional results.

Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

Louis de Broglie, physicist (1892-1987)

In 1923, he proposed that any particle could behave like a wave of wavelength inversely proportional to its momentum (this helps justify Schrödinger's equation). He predicted interferences for an electron beam hitting a crystal.

Nobel 1929 | Wikipedia | MacTutor

Enrico Fermi, physicist (1901-1954)

In 1926, Fermi helped formulate the Fermi-Dirac statistics obeyed by what we now call fermions. He identified the neutrino in beta-decay. He discovered slow neutrons and the radioactivity they induce. On December 2, 1942, Fermi produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Fermions (1926) | "Neutrino" (1933) | Nobel 1938 | Fermilab (1969) | Wikipedia

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984)

In 1925, Paul Dirac came up with the formalism on which quantum mechanics is now based. In 1928, he discovered a relativistic wave function for the electron, predicting the existence of antimatter (observed by Anderson in 1932).

Genealogy | Nobel 1933 | Wikipedia | Facebook Fans

Jancsi "John" von Neumann (1903-1957)

He is credited with the stored program architecture whereby a computer uses its primary memory space to store both the data it operates on and the codes for the programs it executes. Von Neumann also pioneered game theory and decision analysis.

The Scientific 100 | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

Tommy Flowers, engineer (1905-1998)

In 1944, Thomas Harold Flowers built the first large-scale electronic computer (Colossus) at Bletchley Park. As the accomplishment remained classified for decades, Flowers was deprived of the glory which went instead to Mauchly and Eckert for the ENIAC (Philadelphia, 1946).

Wikipedia | Bletchley Park | The design of Colossus by Thomas H. Flowers

Kurt Gödel, logician (1906-1978)

André Weil, mathematician (1906-1998)

Older brother of the philosopher Simone Weil (unrelated to the politician Simone Veil) he was the leading founder of Bourbaki. Weil created algebraic geometry and, arguably, charted the course of much abstract mathematics in the 20-th century.

D.Sc. 1928 | Weil conjectures (1949) | Wikipedia | MacTutor | ams

Alan Turing, computer scientist (1912-1954)

A Turing Machine is a finite automaton endowed with an infinite read/write tape on which it can move back and forth, one step at a time. Turing showed that this type of machine is actually capable of computing anything that any other machine could.

Paul Erdős, mathematician (1913-1996)

Paul Erdös wrote over 1500 papers with 511 collaborators. He contributed many conjectures and proved some great ones. Faced with antisemitism, he left Hungary in 1934 and spent the rest of his frugal life on the road, touring mathematical centers.

Erdös number | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

Richard P. Feynman, physicist (1918-1988)

In 1949, he introduced Feynman diagrams to describe the relativistic quantum theory of electromagnetic interactions known as Quantum electrodynamics (QED). This has helped visualize all other types of fundamental interactions ever since.

Benoît Mandelbrot, mathematician (1924-2010)

Nephew of the founding bourbakist Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899-1983). His family emigrated from Poland to France in 1936 and he was educated at Polytechnique. He founded fractal geometry (but didn't discover the Mandelbrot set).

Wikipedia | MacTutor

Alexander Grothendieck (1928-)

A doctoral student of Laurent Schwartz.

Ph.D. 1953 | Fields Medal 1966 | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Math Men

Steven Weinberg, physicist (1933-)

In 1967, he formulated the electroweak unification of the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism, predicting a massive neutral messenger particle (the Z boson) which was first observed in 1979. Steven Weinberg gave the Standard Model its name.

home | Nobel 1979 | Wikipedia | Emperor Has No Clothes Award | Facebook Fans

John H. Conway (1937-)

In 1970, Conway found the simple rules of a cellular automaton (the Game of Life) capable of self-replication and universal computation. His many other original contributions include the ultimate extension of the ordered number line: surreal numbers.

bibliography | New York Times | The 3 Conway sporadic groups | Wikipedia | MacTutor

Giants of Science

Thales of Miletus, engineer (c. 624-546 BC)

Pythagoras of Samos (c. 569-475 BC)

Democritus of Abdera (c. 460-370 BC)

Hippocrates of Cos, physician (c. 450-377 BC)

Archytas of Tarentum (428-347 BC)

Eudoxus of Cnidus (408-355 BC)

Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 BC)

Euclid of Alexandria (c. 325-265 BC)

Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287-212 BC)

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-194 BC)

Apollonius of Perga (262-190 BC)

Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 190-126 BC)

Pliny the Elder, encyclopedist (AD 23-79)

Dioscorides, pharmacologist (c. AD 40-90)

Ptolemy of Alexandria (c. AD 87-165)

Galen of Pergamos, physician (AD 129-217)

Mary the Jewess, alchemist (3rd century AD)

Pappus of Alexandria (c. AD 290-350)

Hypatia, neoplatonist martyr (c. AD 360-415)

Geber, experimental chemist (c. AD 721-815)

al-Khwarizmi, Algorismus (c. AD 783, fl.847)

Leonardo Pisano Bigollo Fibonacci (1170-1250)

William of Ockham, friar (c.1288-1348)

Nicole Oresme, bishop (1323-1382)

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)

Paracelsus, physician (1493-1541)

Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576)

Ambroise Paré, surgeon (1510-1590)

Andries Wijtinck van Wesele (1514-1564)

François Viète (1540-1603)

Tycho Brahe, astronomer (1546-1601)

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)

William Harvey, physician (1578-1657)

René Descartes (1596-1650)

Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)

Blaise Pascal, philosopher (1623-1662)

Takakazu Seki [Kowa] (1642-1708)

Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749)

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)

Laura Bassi, physicist (1711-1778)

Jean-le-Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783)

Maria-Gaëtana Agnesi (1718-1799)

Henry Cavendish, FRS (1731-1810)

Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794)

Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827)

Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833)

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)

Andre-Marie Ampere (1775-1836)

Sophie Germain (1776-1831)

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Siméon Poisson (1781-1840; X1798)

François Arago (1786-1853; X1803)

Augustin Fresnel (1788-1827; X1804)

Augustin Cauchy (1789-1857; X1805)

Michael Faraday, experimentalist (1791-1867)

Charles Babbage (1791-1871)

Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829)

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804-1851)

Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805-1859)

Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865)

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)

Joseph Liouville (1809-1882; X1825)

Karl Weierstrass, mathematician (1815-1897)

Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace (1815-1852)

Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev (1821-1894)

Arthur Cayley, mathematician (1821-1895)

Charles Hermite (1822-1901; X1842)

Louis Pasteur, microbiologist (1822-1895)

Leopold Kronecker, algebraist (1823-1891)

Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)

Bernhard Riemann, mathematician (1826-1866)

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)

Richard Dedekind, mathematician (1831-1916)

Dmitri Mendeleev, chemist (1834-1907)

Mary the Jewess, alchemist (3^rd century AD)