The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9251
David Bierens de Haan
1822 - 1895 (73 years)
David Bierens de Haan was a Dutch mathematician and historian of science. Biography Bierens de Haan was a son of the rich merchant Abraham Pieterszoon de Haan and Catharina Jacoba Bierens . In 1843 he completed a study in the exact sciences and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1847 under Gideon Janus Verdam for the work . After this he became a teacher of physics and mathematics at a gymnasium in Deventer. In 1852 he married Johanna Catharina Justina de Schepper in Deventer.
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Stanley Skewes
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Stanley Skewes was a South African mathematician, best known for his discovery of the Skewes's number in 1933. He was one of John Edensor Littlewood's students at Cambridge University. Skewes's numbers contributed to the refinement of the theory of prime numbers.
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Charles Jasper Joly
1864 - 1906 (42 years)
Charles Jasper Joly was an Irish mathematician and astronomer who became Royal Astronomer of Ireland. Life He was born at St Catherine's Rectory, Hop Hill, Tullamore, County Offaly, the eldest of six children of Rev. John Swift Joly and Elizabeth Slator .
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Henri Dulac
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Henri Claudius Rosarius Dulac was a French mathematician. Life Born in Fayence, France, Dulac graduated from École Polytechnique and obtained a Doctorate in Mathematics. He started to teach a class of mathematic analysis at University, in Grenoble , Algiers and Poitiers . Holder of a pulpit in pure mathematics in the Sciences University of Lyon in 1911, his teaching was suspended during the first world war and he had to serve as officer in the French army. After the war, he became holder of a pulpit of differential and integral calculus and also taught in École Centrale Lyon. He became examiner at École Polytechnique and President of the admission jury.
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Sergey Chaplygin
1869 - 1942 (73 years)
Sergey Alexeyevich Chaplygin was a Russian and Soviet physicist, mathematician, and mechanical engineer. He is known for mathematical formulas such as Chaplygin's equation and for a hypothetical substance in cosmology called Chaplygin gas, named after him.
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Eugen Netto
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Eugen Otto Erwin Netto was a German mathematician. He was born in Halle and died in Giessen. Netto's theorem, on the dimension-preserving properties of continuous bijections, is named for Netto. Netto published this theorem in 1878, in response to Georg Cantor's proof of the existence of discontinuous bijections between the unit interval and unit square. His proof was not fully rigorous, but its errors were later repaired.
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Gyula Vályi
1855 - 1913 (58 years)
Gyula Vályi was a Hungarian mathematician and theoretical physicist, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, known for his work on mathematical analysis, geometry, and number theory. Life and work Vályi was born in Marosvásárhely, the town of the famous mathematicians Farkas Bolyai and János Bolyai. He attended the Reformed College in Marosvásárhely . After graduating from school, he went to Kolozsvár, the capital of Transylvania, where he attended the Franz Joseph University.
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Raymond Clare Archibald
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Raymond Clare Archibald was a prominent Canadian-American mathematician. He is known for his work as a historian of mathematics, his editorships of mathematical journals and his contributions to the teaching of mathematics.
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Franz Josef Gerstner
1756 - 1832 (76 years)
Franz Josef Gerstner was a German-Bohemian physicist, astronomer and engineer. Life Gerstner was born in Komotau in Bohemia then part of the Habsburg monarchy. . He was the son of Florian Gerstner and Maria Elisabeth, born Englert. He studied at the Jesuits gymnasium in Komotau. After that he studied mathematics and astronomy at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague between 1772 and 1777. In 1781 he started to study medicine at the University of Vienna, but later decided to quit his studies. Instead, he worked as an assistant at the astronomical observatory in Vienna under supervision of Maximilian Hell.
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Artashes Shahinian
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Artashes Shahinian was an Armenian mathematician, Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics , Professor , and member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences Shahinian held several positions, including Head of Chair of Yerevan State University , Dean , Head of the Mathematics and Mechanics Department of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR , Director of the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics , Academy-secretary of the Department of Physics-Mathematical Sciences .
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Hugh Blackburn
1823 - 1909 (86 years)
Bailie Hugh Blackburn was a Scottish mathematician. A lifelong friend of William Thomson , and the husband of illustrator Jemima Blackburn, he was professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow from 1849 to 1879. He succeeded Thomson's father James in the Chair of Mathematics.
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Henry William Watson
1827 - 1903 (76 years)
Rev. Henry William Watson FRS was a mathematician and author of a number of mathematics books. He was an ordained priest and Cambridge Apostle. Life Watson was born at Marylebone on 25 Feb. 1827, the son of Thomas Watson, R.N., and Eleanor Mary Kingston.
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Bohumil Bydžovský
1880 - 1969 (89 years)
Bohumil Bydžovský was a Czech mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry and algebra. Education and career Bydzovsky in 1898 completed his Abitur at the Academic Gymnasium in Prague and then studied mathematics and physics at the Charles University in Prague. There Bydzovsky received his Ph.D. in 1903 with thesis supervised by Karel Petr. Bydzovksy became a teacher at secondary schools, including the reálce in Prague-Karlín from 1907 to 1910 . In 1909 he received his habilitation in mathematics, then lectured at the Polytechnic in Prague, and then in 1911 received his habilitation in engineering.
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John Perry
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
John Perry was a pioneering engineer and mathematician from Ireland. Life He was born on 14 February 1850 at Garvagh, County Londonderry, the second son of Samuel Perry and a Scottish-born wife. John's brother James was the County Surveyor in Galway West and co-founded the Galway Electric Light Company. One of his daughters, Alice, was the one of the first women in the world with an engineering degree.
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Ibn Yunus
950 - 1009 (59 years)
Abu al-Hasan 'Ali ibn 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad ibn Yunus al-Sadafi al-Misri was an important Egyptian astronomer and mathematician, whose works are noted for being ahead of their time, having been based on meticulous calculations and attention to detail.
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François Budan de Boislaurent
1761 - 1840 (79 years)
Ferdinand François Désiré Budan de Boislaurent was a French amateur mathematician, best known for a tract, Nouvelle méthode pour la résolution des équations numériques, first published in Paris in 1807, but based on work from 1803.
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Klara Löbenstein
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Klara Löbenstein was a German mathematician. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves. Life and work Löbenstein was born in Hildesheim, Prussia on 15 February 1883 to merchant Lehmann Löbenstein and his wife Sofie .
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Klavdiya Latysheva
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Klavdiya Yakovlevna Latysheva was a Soviet mathematician known for her contributions to the theory of differential equations, electrodynamics and probability. She was honoured with the Order of Lenin and the Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945".
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Ruy Luís Gomes
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Ruy Luís Gomes was a Portuguese mathematician who made significant contributions to the development of mathematical physics and the state of academia in Portugal during the twentieth century. He was part of a generation of young Portuguese mathematicians, including António Aniceto Monteiro , Hugo Baptista Ribeiro and José Sebastião e Silva , who held the common goal of involving Portugal in the global progression of science through conducting and publishing original research. Because of this, however, he began to gain notoriety as a dissident of the Salazar regime, which condemned independent thinking.
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Mikhail Suslin
1894 - 1919 (25 years)
Mikhail Yakovlevich Suslin was a Russian mathematician who made major contributions to the fields of general topology and descriptive set theory. Biography Mikhail Suslin was born on November 15, 1894, in the village of Krasavka, the only child of poor peasants Yakov Gavrilovich and Matrena Vasil'evna Suslin. From a young age, Suslin showed a keen interest in mathematics and was encouraged to continue his education by his primary school teacher, Vera Andreevna Teplogorskaya-Smirnova. From 1905 to 1913 he attended Balashov boys' grammar school.
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Zdzisław Krygowski
1872 - 1955 (83 years)
Zdzisław Jan Ewangelii Antoni Krygowski was a Polish mathematician, rector of the Lwów Polytechnic , and professor at Poznań University . Enigma Krygowski has become famous in the history of cryptology for having assisted the Polish General Staff in setting up its cryptology course for Poznań University mathematics students that began on 15 January 1929. This led eventually to the General Staff's Cipher Bureau's recruitment of Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski and Jerzy Różycki, who would jointly break and decrypt the World War II-era German Enigma-machine ciphers, beginning at the end of Dece...
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Zoel García de Galdeano
1846 - 1924 (78 years)
Zoel García de Galdeano y Yanguas was a Spanish mathematician. He was considered by Julio Rey Pastor as "The apostle of modern mathematics". Biography His father was a military man, and was killed in war action, so his maternal grandfather, the historian José Yanguas y Miranda , took care of Zoel. To continue his studies, in 1863, Zoel moved to Zaragoza, where he received the title of professor and expert surveyor. In 1869 he graduated as Bachelor. Later he began his studies of Philosophy and Letters, and Sciences at the University of Zaragoza. In 1871, he graduated from these two specialties...
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Gusztáv Rados
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Gusztáv Rados was a Hungarian mathematician. Rados specialized in number theory, linear algebra, algebra, and differential geometry. In 1936, he was awarded the Grand Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
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Yang Hui
1238 - 1298 (60 years)
Yang Hui , courtesy name Qianguang , was a Chinese mathematician and writer during the Song dynasty. Originally, from Qiantang , Yang worked on magic squares, magic circles and the binomial theorem, and is best known for his contribution of presenting Yang Hui's Triangle. This triangle was the same as Pascal's Triangle, discovered by Yang's predecessor Jia Xian. Yang was also a contemporary to the other famous mathematician Qin Jiushao.
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Cardinal Richelieu
1585 - 1642 (57 years)
Armand Jean du Plessis, 1st Duke of Richelieu , known as Cardinal Richelieu, was a French statesman and clergyman. He became known as l'Éminence rouge, or "the Red Eminence", a term derived from the title "Eminence" applied to cardinals and from the red robes that they customarily wear.
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Joichi Suetsuna
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Joichi Suetsuna was a Japanese mathematician who worked mainly on number theory. In addition to working in Japan, where he held a chair at Tokyo University and was eventually selected to the Japan Academy, Suetsuna also spent time studying in Europe and introduced to Japan research styles he witnessed there. Later in life, especially after World War II, he studied Buddhist philosophy.
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Gregorio Fontana
1735 - 1803 (68 years)
Gregorio Fontana, born Giovanni Battista Lorenzo Fontana was an Italian mathematician and a religious of the Piarist order. He was chair of mathematics at the university of Pavia succeeding Roger Joseph Boscovich. He has been credited with the introduction of polar coordinates.
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Paul Taunton Matthews
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Paul Taunton Matthews CBE FRS was a British theoretical physicist. Biography Matthews was born in Erode in British India, and was educated at Mill Hill School and Clare College, Cambridge, where he was awarded MA and PhD degrees. He was awarded the Adams Prize in 1958, elected to the Royal Society in 1963, and awarded the Rutherford Medal and Prize in 1978. He became head of the Physics Department of Imperial College, London and later vice chancellor of the University of Bath. He was also awarded an Honorary Degree by the University of Bath in 1983. He was also chairman of the Nuclear Physic...
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Attilio Palatini
1889 - 1949 (60 years)
Attilio Palatini was an Italian mathematician born in Treviso. Biography Palatini was the seventh of the eight children of Michele and Ilde Furlanetto . In 1900, during the celebrations for the election of his father to Parliament, he was blinded by a young man from Treviso, losing the use of one eye. He completed his secondary studies in Treviso. He graduated in mathematics in 1913 at the University of Padua, where he was a student of Ricci-Curbastro and of Levi-Civita.
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Paul Funk
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Paul Georg Funk was an Austrian mathematician who introduced the Funk transform and who worked on the calculus of variations. Biography Born in Vienna in 1886, Paul Funk was the son of a deputy bank manager and went to high school in Baden and Gmunden. Then, studied mathematics in Tübingen, Vienna, and Göttingen, writing his PhD dissertation under the supervision of David Hilbert.
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Edward Burr Van Vleck
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
Edward Burr Van Vleck was an Americann mathematician. Early life Van Vleck was born June 7, 1863, Middletown, Connecticut. He was the son of astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck, he graduated from Wesleyan University in 1884, attended Johns Hopkins in 1885–87, and studied at Göttingen . He also received 1 July 1914 an honorary doctorate of the University of Groningen . He was assistant professor and professor at Wesleyan , and after 1906 a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where the mathematics building is named after him. His doctoral students include H. S. Wall. In 1913 he beca...
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François Le Lionnais
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
François Le Lionnais was a French chemical engineer and writer. He was a co-founder of the literary movement Oulipo. Biography Le Lionnais was born in Paris on 3 October 1901. Trained as a chemical engineer, he directed the Forges d'Aquiny industrial firm during the years 1928–1929. Active in the French resistance group Front National during World War II, he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in October 1944 and spent six months as a prisoner in the Dora concentration camp. His 1946 essay “La Peinture à Dora” describes his experience as a prisoner.
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Adriaan Vlacq
1600 - 1667 (67 years)
Adriaan Vlacq was a Dutch book publisher and author of mathematical tables. Born in Gouda, Vlacq published a table of logarithms from 1 to 100,000 to 10 decimal places in 1628 in his Arithmetica logarithmica. This table extended Henry Briggs' original tables which only covered the values 1-20,000 and 90,001 to 100,000. The new table was computed by Ezechiel de Decker and Vlacq who calculated and added 70,000 further values to complete the tables. This table was further extended by Jurij Vega in 1794, and by Alexander John Thompson in 1952.
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Victor-Amédée Lebesgue
1791 - 1875 (84 years)
Victor-Amédée Lebesgue, sometimes written Le Besgue, was a mathematician working on number theory. He was elected a member of the Académie des sciences in 1847. See also Catalan's conjectureProof of Fermat's Last Theorem for specific exponentsLebesgue–Nagell type equations
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Nikolaus Hofreiter
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Nikolaus Hofreiter was an Austrian mathematician who worked mainly in number theory. Biography Hofreiter went to school in Linz and studied from 1923 in Vienna with Hans Hahn, Wilhelm Wirtinger, Emil Müller at the Technische Universität Wien on descriptive geometry, and Philipp Furtwängler, with whom he obtained his doctorate in 1927 on the reduction theory of quadratic forms . In 1928 he passed the Lehramtsprüfung examination and completed the probationary year as a teacher in Vienna, but then returned to the university where in 1929 he was assistant to Furtwängler and then habilitated in 1933.
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Daniel Harvey Hill
1821 - 1889 (68 years)
Daniel Harvey Hill , commonly known as D. H. Hill, was a Confederate general who commanded infantry in the eastern and western theaters of the American Civil War. Hill was known as an aggressive leader, being severely strict, deeply religious, and having dry, sarcastic humor. He was brother-in-law to Stonewall Jackson and a close friend to both James Longstreet and Joseph E. Johnston, but disagreements with both Robert E. Lee and Braxton Bragg cost him favor with Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Although his military ability was well respected, Hill was underutilized by the end of the Am...
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Milton Abramowitz
1915 - 1958 (43 years)
Milton Abramowitz was a Jewish American mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards who, with Irene Stegun, edited a classic book of mathematical tables called Handbook of Mathematical Functions, widely known as Abramowitz and Stegun. Abramowitz died of a heart attack in 1958, at which time the book was not yet completed but was well underway. Stegun took over management of the project and was able to finish the work by 1964, working under the direction of the NBS Chief of Numerical Analysis Philip J. Davis, who was also a contributor to the book.
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Nikolay Yakovlevich Sonin
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
Nikolay Yakovlevich Sonin was a Russian mathematician. Biography He was born in Tula and attended Lomonosov University, studying mathematics and physics there from 1865 to 1869. His advisor was Nikolai Bugaev. He obtained a master's degree with a thesis submitted in 1871, then he taught at the University of Warsaw where he obtained a doctorate in 1874. He was appointed to a chair in the University of Warsaw in 1876. In 1894, Sonin moved to St. Petersburg, where he taught at the University for Women.
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Karl Heun
1859 - 1929 (70 years)
Karl Heun was a German mathematician who introduced Heun's equation, Heun functions, and Heun's method. Karl Heun studied mathematics and philosophy in Göttingen . In 1881 with the dissertation Die Kugelfunktionen und Laméschen Funktionen als Determinanten he received his doctorate under Schering at the University of Göttingen. He then worked as a teacher at an agricultural college in Wehlau, until in 1883 he emigrated to England where he taught until 1885 in Uppingham.
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Ivan Pervushin
1827 - 1900 (73 years)
Ivan Mikheevich Pervushin was a Russian clergyman and mathematician of the second half of the 19th century, known for his achievements in number theory. He discovered the ninth perfect number and its odd prime factor, the ninth Mersenne prime. Also, he proved that two Fermat numbers, the 12th and 23rd, were composite.
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Isaac Milner
1750 - 1820 (70 years)
Isaac Milner was a mathematician, an inventor, the President of Queens' College, Cambridge and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. He was instrumental in the 1785 religious conversion of William Wilberforce and helped him through many trials and was a great supporter of the abolitionists' campaign against the slave trade, steeling Wilberforce with his assurance before the 1789 parliamentary debate:
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David Emmanuel
1854 - 1941 (87 years)
David Emmanuel was a Romanian Jewish mathematician and member of the Romanian Academy, considered to be the founder of the modern mathematics school in Romania. Born in Bucharest, Emmanuel studied at Gheorghe Lazăr and Gheorghe Șincai high schools. In 1873 he went to Paris, where he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Paris in 1879 with a thesis on Study of abelian integrals of the third species, becoming the second Romanian to have a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Sorbonne . The thesis defense committee consisted of Victor Puiseux , Charles Briot, and Jean-Claude Bouquet...
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Carl Anton Bjerknes
1825 - 1903 (78 years)
Carl Anton Bjerknes was a Norwegian mathematician and physicist. Bjerknes' earlier work was in pure mathematics, but he is principally known for his studies in hydrodynamics. Biography Carl Anton Bjerknes was born in Oslo, Norway. His father was Abraham Isaksen Bjerknes and his mother Elen Birgitte Holmen. Bjerknes studied mining at the University of Oslo, and after that mathematics at the University of Göttingen and the University of Paris. In 1866 he held a chair for applied mathematics and in 1869 for mathematics. Over a fifty-year time period, Bjerknes taught mathematics at the Universit...
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Robert Harley
1828 - 1910 (82 years)
Robert Harley was an English Congregational minister and mathematician. Life Born in Liverpool on 23 January 1828, he was third son of Robert Harley by his wife Mary, daughter of William Stevenson, and niece of General Stevenson of Ayr.. The father, after a career as a merchant, became a minister of the Wesleyan Methodist Association. Harley's mathematical aptitude developed at school in Blackburn under William Hoole, and age 16 he was appointed to a mathematical mastership at Seacombe, near Liverpool, returning later to teach at Blackburn.
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Paul Matthieu Hermann Laurent
1841 - 1908 (67 years)
Paul Matthieu Hermann Laurent was a French mathematician. Despite his large body of works, Laurent series expansions for complex functions were not named after him, but after Pierre Alphonse Laurent.
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Pierre Remond de Montmort
1678 - 1719 (41 years)
Pierre Remond de Montmort was a French mathematician. He was born in Paris on 27 October 1678 and died there on 7 October 1719. His name was originally just Pierre Remond. His father pressured him to study law, but he rebelled and travelled to England and Germany, returning to France in 1699 when, upon receiving a large inheritance from his father, he bought an estate and took the name de Montmort. He was friendly with several other notable mathematicians, and especially Nicholas Bernoulli, who collaborated with him while visiting his estate. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 17...
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Mary P. Dolciani
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
Mary P. Dolciani was an American mathematician, known for her work with secondary-school mathematics teachers. Education and career Dolciani earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at Hunter College in New York City, and she completed her doctor of philosophy at Cornell University in 1947 with B. W. Jones as thesis advisor. She taught briefly at Vassar College before returning to Hunter, where she spent the next forty years. Dolciani taught mathematics there, and at times, she also served as a Dean or the Provost.
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A. A. Krishnaswami Ayyangar
1892 - 1953 (61 years)
A. A. Krishnaswami Ayyangar was an Indian mathematician. He received his M.A. in Mathematics at the age of 18 from Pachaiyappa's College, and subsequently taught mathematics there. In 1918, he joined the mathematics department of the University of Mysore and retired from there in 1947. He was born in a Tamil Brahmin family. He died in June 1953. He was the father of the Kannada poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan.
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Johannes Frischauf
1837 - 1924 (87 years)
Johannes Frischauf was an Austrian mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geodesist and alpinist. Life and work Frischauf passed the matura at the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna and in 1857 studied mathematics, physics, astronomy at the University of Vienna, as well as geodesy, chemistry, mechanics at the Technischen Hochschule Vienna. He obtained the doctorate in 1864, and became Privatdozent for mathematics at the University of Vienna and assistant at the observatory of the university. In 1863 he was habilitated in mathematics. Starting in 1863, he was professor at the University of Graz for pure and applied mathematics.
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Antonio Maria Bordoni
1789 - 1860 (71 years)
Antonio Maria Bordoni was an Italian mathematician who did research on mathematical analysis, geometry, and mechanics. Joining the faculty of the University of Pavia in 1817, Bordoni is generally considered to be the founder of the mathematical school of Pavia. He was a member of various learned academies, notably the Accademia dei XL. Bordoni's famous students were Francesco Brioschi, Luigi Cremona, Eugenio Beltrami, Felice Casorati and Delfino Codazzi.
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