write 100 lines on ten famous mathematicians
Answers
- Pythagoras (circa 570-495BC)
Vegetarian mystical leader and number-obsessive, he owes his standing as the most famous name in maths due to a theorem about right-angled triangles, although it now appears it probably predated him. He lived in a community where numbers were venerated as much for their spiritual qualities as for their mathematical ones.
Hypatia (cAD360-415)
Mathematician-Hypatia
Hypatia (375-415AD), a Greek woman mathematician and philosopher. Photograph: © Bettmann/Corbis
Women are under-represented in mathematics, yet the history of the subject is not exclusively male. Hypatia was a scholar at the library in Alexandria in the 4th century CE. Her most valuable scientific legacy was her edited version of Euclid's The Elements, the most important Greek mathematical text, and one of the standard versions for centuries after her particularly horrific death: she was murdered by a Christian mob who stripped her naked, peeled away her flesh with broken pottery and ripped apart her limbs.
Girolamo Cardano (1501 -1576)
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Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), mathematician, astrologer and physician. Photograph: SSPL/Getty
Italian polymath for whom the term Renaissance man could have been invented. A doctor by profession, he was the author of 131 books. He was also a compulsive gambler. It was this last habit that led him to the first scientific analysis of probability. He realised he could win more on the dicing table if he expressed the likelihood of chance events using numbers. This was a revolutionary idea, and it led to probability theory, which in turn led to the birth of statistics, marketing, the insurance industry and the weather forecast.
Leonhard Euler (1707- 1783)
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Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). Photograph: Science and Society Picture Library
The most prolific mathematician of all time, publishing close to 900 books. When he went blind in his late 50s his productivity in many areas increased. His famous formula eiπ + 1 = 0, where e is the mathematical constant sometimes known as Euler's number and i is the square root of minus one, is widely considered the most beautiful in mathematics. He later took an interest in Latin squares – grids where each row and column contains each member of a set of numbers or objects once. Without this work, we might not have had sudoku.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
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Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS
Known as the prince of mathematicians, Gauss made significant contributions to most fields of 19th century mathematics. An obsessive perfectionist, he didn't publish much of his work, preferring to rework and improve theorems first. His revolutionary discovery of non-Euclidean space (that it is mathematically consistent that parallel lines may diverge) was found in his notes after his death. During his analysis of astronomical data, he realised that measurement error produced a bell curve – and that shape is now known as a Gaussian distribution.
Georg Cantor (1845-1918)
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Georg Ferdinand Cantor (1845-1918), German mathematician. Photograph: © Corbis
Of all the great mathematicians, Cantor most perfectly fulfils the (Hollywood) stereotype that a genius for maths and mental illness are somehow inextricable. Cantor's most brilliant insight was to develop a way to talk about mathematical infinity. His set theory lead to the counter-intuitive discovery that some infinities were larger than others. The result was mind-blowing. Unfortunately he suffered mental breakdowns and was frequently hospitalised. He also became fixated on proving that the works of Shakespeare were in fact written by Francis Bacon.
Paul Erdös (1913-1996)
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Paul Erdos (1913-96).
Erdös lived a nomadic, possession-less life, moving from university to university, from colleague's spare room to conference hotel. He rarely published alone, preferring to collaborate – writing about 1,500 papers,