Achievements of 5 great mathematics
Answers
Answer:
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
We start our list with Sir Isaac Newton, considered by many to be the greatest scientist of all time. There aren't many subjects that Newton didn't have a huge impact in — he was one of the inventors of calculus, built the first reflecting telescope and helped establish the field of classical mechanics with his seminal work, "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica." He was the first to decompose white light into its component colors and gave us the three laws of motion, now known as Newton's laws. (You might remember the first one from school: "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force.")
We would live in a very different world had Sir Isaac Newton not been born. Other scientists would probably have worked out most of his ideas eventually, but there is no telling how long it would have taken and how far behind we might have fallen from our current technological trajectory.
Carl Gauss (1777-1855)
Isaac Newton is a hard act to follow, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Carl Gauss. If Newton is considered the greatest scientist of all time, Gauss could easily be called the greatest mathematician ever. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born to a poor family in Germany in 1777 and quickly showed himself to be a brilliant mathematician. He published "Arithmetical Investigations," a foundational textbook that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole numbers). Without number theory, you could kiss computers goodbye. Computers operate, on a the most basic level, using just two digits — 1 and 0, and many of the advancements that we've made in using computers to solve problems are solved using number theory. Gauss was prolific, and his work on number theory was just a small part of his contribution to math; you can find his influence throughout algebra, statistics, geometry, optics, astronomy and many other subjects that underlie our modern world.
John von Neumann (1903-1957)
John von Neumann was born János Neumann in Budapest a few years after the start of the 20th century, a well-timed birth for all of us, for he went on to design the architecture underlying nearly every single computer built on the planet today. Right now, whatever device or computer that you are reading this on, be it phone or computer, is cycling through a series of basic steps billions of times over each second; steps that allow it to do things like render Internet articles and play videos and music, steps that were first thought up by John von Neumann.
Von Neumann received his Ph.D in mathematics at the age of 22 while also earning a degree in chemical engineering to appease his father, who was keen on his son having a good marketable skill. Thankfully for all of us, he stuck with math. In 1930, he went to work at Princeton University with Albert Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study. Before his death in 1957, von Neumann made important discoveries in set theory, geometry, quantum mechanics, game theory, statistics, computer science and was a vital member of the Manhattan Project.
Alan Turing (1912-1954)
Alan Turing a British mathematician who has been call the father of computer science. During World War II, Turing bent his brain to the problem of breaking Nazi crypto-code and was the one to finally unravel messages protected by the infamous Enigma machine. Being able to break Nazi codes gave the Allies an enormous advantage and was later credited by Winston Churchill as one of the main reasons the Allies won the war.
Besides helping to stop Nazi Germany from achieving world domination, Alan Turing was instrumental in the development of the modern day computer. His design for a so-called "Turing machine" remains central to how computers operate today. The "Turing test" is an exercise in artificial intelligence that tests how well an AI program operates; a program passes the Turing test if it can have a text chat conversation with a human and fool that person into thinking that it too is a person.
Alan Turing's career and life ended tragically when he was arrested and prosecuted for being gay. He was found guilty and sentenced to undergo hormone treatment to reduce his libido, losing his security clearance as well. On June, 8, 1954, Alan Turing was found dead of apparent suicide by his cleaning lady.
Turing's contributions to computer science can be summed up by the fact that his name now adorns the field's top award. The Turing Award is to computer science what the Nobel Prize is to chemistry or the Fields Medal is to mathematics. In 2009, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for how his government treated Turing, but stopped short of issuing an official pardon.