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From schizophrenia to gender discrimination, these famous mathematicians made their mark in numbers. Helping to power the futuristic world we now live in.
The “Father of Geometry,” or Euclid, authored the mathematical document Elements, which remained the standard textbook for math for over two millennia, second only to the Bible in printed editions. Euclid also developed the deductive reasoning framework still used in mathematics today.
The Greek mathematician Archimedes calculated pi and developed principles of buoyancy. He’s most famous for screaming “Eureka!” while running naked through Syracuse after realizing that water displacement could measure an object’s volume.
Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician whose theorem about right triangles revolutionized geometry, founded a secretive cult-like school whose members followed strict rules, including the prohibition against eating beans—believing they contained human souls.
Sir Isaac Newton revolutionized physics with his laws of motion and universal gravitation. But he obsessively pursued the study of alchemy more than he did the scientific work that made him famous.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath who independently developed calculus alongside Isaac Newton. A start of bitter rivalry in mathematics that would go on for decades. He also invented the binary number system that is fundamental to modern computing.
Carl Friedrich Gauss was known as the “Prince of Mathematicians” who revolutionized number theory and statistics. He became a math prodigy at age 10 when he calculated the sum of integers from 1 to 100 by recognizing they could be paired to create equal sums.
Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler contributed to multiple fields of mathematics with over 850 works—introducing crucial notation like e and π. He continued producing groundbreaking research even after going blind in 1766, dictating complex equations to assistants from memory.
Bernhard Riemann, the German math genius, helped us understand curved space with his differential geometry. Riemann suffered from debilitating shyness that caused him to mumble during lectures, making his groundbreaking ideas—which later became essential to Einstein’s theory of relativity—difficult for students to understand.
Alan Turing is best known for cracking Nazi Germany’s Enigma code during World War II and laying the theoretical groundwork for modern computer science. Turing faced tragic persecution for his homosexuality when, despite his crucial wartime contributions, he was chemically castrated by the British government before dying of cyanide poisoning at age 41.
Emmy Noether, a German mathematician who revolutionized abstract algebra and physics with her theorem connecting symmetries to conservation laws. She had to overcome gender discrimination in early 20th century academia to become the first female professor at a German university despite initially being forced to lecture under male colleagues’ names.
Self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan produced nearly 3,900 groundbreaking concepts in number theory and infinite series. He had minimal formal education, claiming his mathematical insights came directly from visions of the Hindu goddess Namagiri.
David Hilbert was a German mathematician who formalized modern mathematical systems and set the 20th century’sresearch agenda with his famous list of 23 unsolved problems. He’s probably best known for his paradoxical “Hilbert’s Hotel” thought experiment that elegantly illustrates how an infinite hotel can always accommodate more guests despite being completely full.
French lawyer Pierre de Fermat made profound contributions to probability theory and calculus but is most famous for his Last Theorem. He claimed to have proven the theorem in a book margin, yet it was too small to contain his “marvelous proof.” This mathematical mystery remained unsolved for 358 years until Andrew Wiles finally proved it in 1994.
Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann was a polymath in multiple fields, including quantum mechanics, game theory, and computer science. His remarkable intellect was powered by a photographic memory that allowed him to perform complex calculations mentally without writing them down.
Henri Poincaré was the “last universalist” in mathematics who laid foundations for chaos theory and topology. He almost discovered relativity before Einstein. Despite his notoriously messy working style, Poincaré maintained such a prolific output across diverse fields that he revolutionized both pure mathematics and theoretical physics.
Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, wrote the first computer algorithm in history for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in 1843. An impressive feat in an era when women were largely excluded from scientific pursuits.
Georg Cantor developed set theory and revealed that some infinities are larger than others—a concept that triggered intense criticism and contributed to his mental breakdowns, eventually leading to his death in a psychiatric hospital.
French mathematical genius Évariste Galois founded group theory and transformed our understanding of algebra. He frantically wrote his groundbreaking theories the night before his death in a duel at age 20, reportedly scribbling “I have no time” in the margins of his final work.
Austrian logician Kurt Gödel, who revolutionized mathematical foundations with his incompleteness theorems in the 1930s, developed such an intense fear of being poisoned that he would only eat food prepared by his wife. Sadly, after his wife’s hospitalization, he tragically starved to death.
Hypatia was the first recorded female mathematician who taught philosophy in Alexandria. She met a brutal end when a Christian mob murdered her for her pagan beliefs and genius.
Persian mathematician and astronomer Al-Khwarizmi introduced algebra to the Western world during the 9th century, leaving such a profound legacy that the word “algorithm” derives directly from the Latin form of his name.
Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (Fibonacci) introduced Arabic numerals to Europe via his influential book “Liber Abaci” in 1202. The book presented the famous Fibonacci sequence—a pattern he discovered while modeling rabbit population growth, where each number equals the sum of the two preceding ones.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician who published over 800 research papers that established the foundations of modern mathematical analysis. He was known for his steadfast religious principles that led him to refuse collaboration with non-Catholics.
French mathematician Sophie Germain made groundbreaking contributions to number theory and elasticity despite severe gender discrimination in the 18th and 19th centuries. For people to take her work seriously, she had to correspond with other leading mathematicians under the male pseudonym “Monsieur Antoine-August Le Blanc.”
John Nash’s pioneering work in game theory earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nash led a dramatic life marked by extraordinary mathematical insights and a decades-long struggle with schizophrenia that became widely known through the film A Beautiful Mind.
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