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. The Theorem of Thales (one of two) is about two triangles with parallel sides: The shadow of the pyramid is to the pyramid what the shadow of a man 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).

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 (276-294 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 experimental measurement of the circumference of the Earth.

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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 is also credited with eponymous gibberish on occult alchemy.

Wikipedia | Jabir | Chemical Heritage Foundation | al Shindagah

Nicole Oresme (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.

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.

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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. In hindsight, Kepler also paved the road to Calculus.

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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 relentlessly pursued investigations in mathematics and physics in his spare time (his judicial work suffered).

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.

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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.

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Leonhard Euler, Swiss expatriate (1707-1783)

The most prolific mathematician of all times, Euler became totally blind in 1771 but produced almost half of his phenomenal output in St. Petersburg after 1766, with the help of several assistants, including the young Nicolaus Fuss (1755-1826) from 1773 on.

Solution of the Basel Problem (1735) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

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

Born illegitimately to Louis Camus Destouches-Canon 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.

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Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)

Lagrange pioneered the calculus of variation (before Euler gave it that name, in 1766) and applied it to analytical mechanics. He also invented Lagrange multipliers. In 1794, Polytechnique was founded and Lagrange became its first professor of analysis.

Remarkable Mathematicians (pdf) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

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. He went on to become one of the most innovative and influential scientists ever. (Laplacian, Laplace transform, etc.)

Taupe Laplace (Caen) | MacTutor | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

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

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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Augustin Fresnel (1788-1827; X1804)

Educated in Caen and at Polytechnique 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.

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Augustin Cauchy (1789-1857; X1805)

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 came up with the Law of Electromagnetic Induction, which ultimately 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

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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 | Wikipedia | Weisstein | Facebook Fans

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.

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Arthur Cayley (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 providing a formal proof.

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 tenets of Set Theory.

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

Bernhard Riemann, mathematician (1826-1866)

In 1851, his thesis introduced Riemann surfaces. His habilitation lecture on the foundations of geometry (1854) stunned even Gauss. In 1859, Riemann probed the distribution of primes with his zeta function and he formulated the Riemann Hypothesis.

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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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Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906)

Boltzmann was a proponent of atomic theory and the father of statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's constant is the coefficient of proportionality between entropy (in J/k) and the natural logarithm of the number of allowed physical states.

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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.

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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 (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.
Signature of
Henri Poincare

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Nikola Tesla, inventor (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. The SI unit of magnetic induction (magnetic flux density) was named after him, in 1960.

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

Max Planck (1858-1947)

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

Marie Curie, physical chemist (1867-1934)

Marie Sklodowska-Curie 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.

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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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 would unify with gravity in 1915 by formulating the General Theory of Relativity.

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 the mathematical aspects of physics. In 1913, Weyl became a colleague of Einstein's at the ETH Zürich. He befriended Shrödinger 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.

Nobel 1933 | Nobel Lecture | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

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.

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Louis de Broglie, physicist (1892-1987)

In 1923, de Broglie proposed that any particle has wavelike properties, with a 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

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, which predicted the existence of antimatter (first observed by Anderson in 1932).

Nobel 1933 | Wikipedia | Facebook Fans

Jancsi "John" von Neumann (1903-1957)

He is credited with the stored program architecture whereby a computer use 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

Kurt Gödel, logician (1906-1978)

André Weil (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.

The Death of Alan Turing (Video) | Wikipedia | MacTutor | Facebook Fans

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.

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

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