The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#9301
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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Alice Lee
1858 - 1939 (81 years)
Alice Lee was a British mathematician, one of the first women to graduate from London University. She was awarded a PhD in 1901. She worked with Karl Pearson from 1892. She demonstrated that the correlation between cranial capacity and gender was not a sign of greater intelligence in men compared to women.
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Virginia Ragsdale
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Virginia Ragsdale was a teacher and mathematician specializing in algebraic curves. She is most known as the creator of the Ragsdale conjecture. Early life Ragsdale was born on a farm in Jamestown, North Carolina the third child of John Sinclair Ragsdale and Emily Jane Idol. John was an officer in the Civil War, a teacher in the Flint Hill School, and later a state legislator.
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Hans Frederick Blichfeldt
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Hans Frederick Blichfeldt was a Danish-American mathematician at Stanford University, known for his contributions to group theory, the representation theory of finite groups, the geometry of numbers, sphere packing, and quadratic forms. He is the namesake of Blichfeldt's theorem.
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Derrick Norman Lehmer
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Derrick Norman Lehmer was an American mathematician and number theorist. Education He was educated at the University of Nebraska, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1893 and master's in 1896. Lehmer was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1900 for a thesis Asymptotic Evaluation of Certain Totient-Sums under the supervision of E. H. Moore.
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Frederik Schuh
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Frederik Schuh was a Dutch mathematician. Career He completed his PhD in algebraic geometry from Amsterdam University in 1905, where his advisor was Diederik Johannes Korteweg. He taught at the Technische Hoogeschool at Delft and at Groningen .
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Felix Gantmacher
1908 - 1964 (56 years)
Felix Ruvimovich Gantmacher was a Soviet mathematician, professor at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, well known for his contributions in mechanics, linear algebra and Lie group theory. In 1925–1926 he participated in seminar guided by Nikolai Chebotaryov in Odessa and wrote his first research paper in 1926.
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Leonard James Rogers
1862 - 1933 (71 years)
Leonard James Rogers FRS was a British mathematician who was the first to discover the Rogers–Ramanujan identity and Hölder's inequality, and who introduced Rogers polynomials. The Rogers–Szegő polynomials are named after him.
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Vladimir Ignatowski
1875 - 1942 (67 years)
Vladimir Sergeyevitch Ignatowski, or Waldemar Sergius von Ignatowsky and similar names in other publications , was a Russian physicist. Life and work Ignatowski graduated in 1906 in Saint Petersburg. 1906-1908 he continued to study at the University of Giessen, with his dissertation in 1909. 1911-1914 he taught at the Higher Technical School in Berlin. Afterwards he worked for different institutions in the Soviet Union. Then he became a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
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Nikolai Kochin
1901 - 1944 (43 years)
Nikolai Yevgrafovich Kochin was a Russian and Soviet mathematician specialising in applied mathematics, and especially fluid and gas mechanics. Biography Kochin graduated from Petrograd University in 1923. He taught mathematics and mechanics at Leningrad State University from 1924 to 1934.
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Al-Sijzi
951 - 1024 (73 years)
Abu Sa'id Ahmed ibn Mohammed ibn Abd al-Jalil al-Sijzi was an Iranian Muslim astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer. He is notable for his correspondence with al-Biruni and for proposing that the Earth rotates around its axis in the 10th century.
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Stanislav Vydra
1741 - 1804 (63 years)
Stanislav Vydra was a Bohemian Jesuit priest, writer, mathematician. Life Vydra entered the Jesuit novitiate of Hradec Králové in 1757. After two years in Brno, he studied philosophy and mathematics from 1762 to 1764 at Charles University. His teachers included Joseph Stepling and Jan Tesánek.
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Abu Nasr Mansur
960 - 1036 (76 years)
Abu Nasri Mansur ibn Ali ibn Iraq al-Jaʿdī was a Persian Muslim mathematician and astronomer. He is well known for his work with the spherical sine law. Abu Nasr Mansur was born in Gilan, Persia, to the ruling family of Khwarezm, the Afrighids. He was thus a prince within the political sphere. He was a student of Abu'l-Wafa and a teacher of and also an important colleague of the mathematician, Al-Biruni. Together, they were responsible for great discoveries in mathematics and dedicated many works to one another.
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Jakob II Bernoulli
1759 - 1789 (30 years)
Jakob II Bernoulli , younger brother of Johann III Bernoulli, was a Swiss physicist. Biography Having finished his literary studies, he was, according to custom, sent to Neuchâtel to learn French. On his return, he graduated in law. This study, however, did not check his hereditary taste for geometry. The early lessons which he had received from his father were continued by his uncle Daniel, and such was his progress that at the age of twenty-one he was called to undertake the duties of the chair of experimental physics, which his uncle's advanced years rendered him unable to discharge. He aft...
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D. C. Pavate
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Dadappa Chintappa "D. C." Pavate, was awarded Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 1967. He was the vice-chancellor of the Karnatak university Dharwad, and the Governor of Punjab. Pavate was a Cambridge Mathematical Tripos wrangler.
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Carlo Somigliana
1860 - 1955 (95 years)
Carlo Somigliana was an Italian mathematician and a classical mathematical physicist, faithful member of the school of Enrico Betti and Eugenio Beltrami. He made important contributions to linear elasticity: the Somigliana integral equation, analogous to Green's formula in potential theory, and the Somigliana dislocations are named after him. Other fields he contribute to include seismic wave propagation, gravimetry and glaciology. One of his ancestors was Alessandro Volta: precisely, the great Como physicist was an ancestor of Carlo's mother, Teresa Volta.
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Mary Frances Winston Newson
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Mary Frances Winston Newson was an American mathematician. She became the first female American to receive a PhD in mathematics from a European university, namely the University of Göttingen in Germany. She was also the first person to translate Hilbert's problems into English.
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Winifred Edgerton Merrill
1862 - 1951 (89 years)
Winifred Edgerton was born in Ripon, Wisconsin. She was the first woman to receive a degree from Columbia University and the first American woman to receive a PhD in mathematics. She was awarded a PhD with high honors from Columbia University in 1886, by a unanimous vote of the board of trustees, after being rejected once.
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Edward Lear
1812 - 1888 (76 years)
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.
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Carl Friedrich Geiser
1843 - 1934 (91 years)
Carl Friedrich Geiser was a Swiss mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. He is known for the Geiser involution and Geiser's minimal surface. Education and career Geiser's father was a butcher and innkeeper. The famous Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner was Carl F. Geiser's great-uncle. Geiser studied for four semesters from 1859 to 1861 at the Zürich Polytechnikum and then went to Berlin for four semesters from 1861 to 1863 to study under Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. Since the support from his parents was not sufficient, he gave private lessons to students, some of whom were found for him by Weierstrass and Kronecker.
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Frédéric Marty
1911 - 1940 (29 years)
Frédéric Ladislas Joseph Marty was a French mathematician. Frédéric Marty's father was the mathematician Joseph Marty , who taught at the lycée d'Albi and as a French army officer was killed in action in WW I.
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Gustaf Eneström
1852 - 1923 (71 years)
Gustaf Hjalmar Eneström was a Swedish mathematician, statistician and historian of mathematics known for introducing the Eneström index, which is used to identify Euler's writings. Most historical scholars refer to the works of Euler by their Eneström index.
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Ajima Naonobu
1732 - 1798 (66 years)
Ajima Naonobu, also known as Ajima Manzō Chokuyen, was a Japanese mathematician of the Edo period. His Dharma name was . Work Ajima is credited with introducing calculus into Japanese mathematics. The significance of this innovation is diminished by a likelihood that he had access to European writings on the subject. Ajima also posed the question of inscribing three mutually tangent circles in a triangle; these circles are now known as Malfatti circles after the later work of Gian Francesco Malfatti, but two triangle centers derived from them, the Ajima–Malfatti points, are named after Ajima.
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Charles Wilkes
1798 - 1877 (79 years)
Charles Wilkes was an American naval officer, ship's captain, and explorer. He led the United States Exploring Expedition . During the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865, he commanded during the Trent Affair in which he stopped a Royal Mail ship and removed two Confederate diplomats, which almost led to war between the United States and the United Kingdom.
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Max Koecher
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Max Koecher was a German mathematician. Biography Koecher studied mathematics and physics at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen. In 1951, he received his doctorate under Max Deuring with his work on Dirichlet series with functional equation where he introduced Koecher–Maass series. He qualified in 1954 at the Westfälische Wilhelms University in Münster. From 1962 to 1970, Koecher was department chair at the University of Munich. He retired in 1989.
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Georges Henri Halphen
1844 - 1889 (45 years)
Georges-Henri Halphen was a French mathematician. He was known for his work in geometry, particularly in enumerative geometry and the singularity theory of algebraic curves, in algebraic geometry. He also worked on invariant theory and projective differential geometry.
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Friedrich Böhm
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Friedrich Böhm was a German actuarial and insurance mathematician and university lecturer. During World War II, Böhm was conscripted into Group IV of Inspectorate 7 , an early cipher bureau and Signals intelligence agency of the German Army , working to decode foreign Ciphers. He would later work in the successor organization: General der Nachrichtenaufklärung, in a similar role.
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Jacques Lipchitz
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor. Lipchitz retained highly figurative and legible components in his work leading up to 1915–16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, dominated by a synthetic style of Crystal Cubism. In 1920 Lipchitz held his first solo exhibition, at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne in Paris where he was counted as part of the School of Paris. Fleeing the Nazis he moved to the US and settled in New York City and eventually Hastings-on-Hudson.
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Heinrich Liebmann
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Karl Otto Heinrich Liebmann was a German mathematician and geometer. Life Liebmann was the son of Otto Liebmann , a Jewish neo-Kantian philosophy professor in Jena. Heinrich studied from 1895 to 1897 at the universities Leipzig, Jena and Göttingen. In 1895 he was awarded the doctorate under Carl Johannes Thomae with the subject Die einzweideutigen projektiven Punktverwandtschaften der Ebene and passed the Lehramtsprüfung in 1896. In 1897 he was an assistant in Göttingen and in 1898 in Leipzig, where he was habilitated on the subject Über die Verbiegung der geschlossenen Flächen positiver Krümmung.
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Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz
1606 - 1682 (76 years)
Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz was a Spanish Catholic scholastic philosopher, ecclesiastic, mathematician and writer. He is believed to be a great-grandson of Jan Popel y Lobkowicz. Life Juan Caramuel was born in Madrid in 1606, the son of Count Lorenzo Caramuel and Caterina Frissea von Lobkowitz, a descendant of a Czech noble family. He was instructed in oriental languages by Archbishop Juan de Esron . By the age of 17, he was studying at the University of Alcalá de Henares, where he took his degree in the humanities and philosophy. His theological teachers at the University of Alcalá included the Dominicans John of St.
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Stefano degli Angeli
1623 - 1697 (74 years)
Stefano degli Angeli was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, and Jesuate. He was member of the Catholic Order of the Jesuats . In 1668 the order was suppressed by Pope Clement IX. Angeli was a student of Bonaventura Cavalieri. From 1662 until his death he taught at the University of Padua.
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Edwin A. Maxwell
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Edwin Arthur Maxwell was a Scottish mathematician, who worked at Cambridge University for most of his career. Although his contributions to original research were limited, his main contribution was in the area of mathematical education, including his 1959 work Fallacies in Mathematics. His doctoral supervisor was H.F. Baker. He was president of the Mathematical Association.
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Kurt Vogel
1888 - 1985 (97 years)
Kurt Vogel was a German historian of mathematics. Life and Work Vogel was born in Altdorf bei Nürnberg and attended school in Ansbach. From 1907 to 1911, he studied mathematics and physics with Max Noether, Paul Gordan, and Erhard Schmidt in Erlangen, and with Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Otto Toeplitz in Göttingen. He passed his examination to become a schoolteacher in 1911, then served as an army officer from 1913 to 1920 before taking a teaching post in Munich.
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Wilhelm Ljunggren
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Wilhelm Ljunggren was a Norwegian mathematician, specializing in number theory. Career Ljunggren was born in Kristiania and finished his secondary education in 1925. He studied at the University of Oslo, earning a master's degree in 1931 under the supervision of Thoralf Skolem, and found employment as a secondary school mathematics teacher in Bergen, following Skolem who had moved in 1930 to the Chr. Michelsen Institute there. While in Bergen, Ljunggren continued his studies, earning a dr.philos. from the University of Oslo in 1937.
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Georg Simon Klügel
1739 - 1812 (73 years)
Georg Simon Klügel was a German mathematician and physicist. He was born in Hamburg, and in 1760 went to the University of Göttingen where he initially studied theology before switching to mathematics. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was a fellow student. His doctoral thesis Conatuum praecipuorum theoriam parallelarum demonstrandi recensio, published in 1763 with Abraham Gotthelf Kästner as doctoral advisor, was a study of 30 attempted proofs of the parallel postulate. It was influential at the time and much cited.
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Willebrord Snellius
1580 - 1626 (46 years)
Willebrord Snellius was a Dutch astronomer and mathematician, Snell. His name is usually associated with the law of refraction of light known as Snell's law. The lunar crater Snellius is named after Willebrord Snellius. The Royal Netherlands Navy has named three survey ships after Snellius, including a currently-serving vessel.
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Maurice Kraitchik
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Maurice Borisovich Kraitchik was a Belgian mathematician and populariser. His main interests were the theory of numbers and recreational mathematics. He was born to a Jewish family in Minsk. He wrote several books on number theory during 1922–1930 and after the war, and from 1931 to 1939 edited Sphinx, a periodical devoted to recreational mathematics. During World War II, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught a course at the New School for Social Research in New York City on the general topic of "mathematical recreations."
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Adam Ries
1492 - 1559 (67 years)
Adam Ries was a German mathematician. He is also known by the name Adam Riese. Life Almost nothing is known about Ries' childhood, youth and education. The exact year of his birth is not known. The caption on the only known contemporary portrait of the mathematician reads: ANNO 1550 ADAM RIES SEINS ALTERS IM LVIII. So apparently he was in his 58th year of age at the time of the picture, which was made in 1550. From this it can be deduced that he was born in 1492 or 1493.
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Robert Fludd
1574 - 1637 (63 years)
Robert Fludd, also known as Robertus de Fluctibus , was a prominent English Paracelsian physician with both scientific and occult interests. He is remembered as an astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, Qabalist and Rosicrucian.
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Isabel Maddison
1869 - 1950 (81 years)
Ada Isabel Maddison was a British mathematician best known for her work on differential equations. Education Isabel Maddison entered University College in Cardiff in 1885. She was awarded a Clothworker's Guild Scholarship to study at Girton College, Cambridge, where she matriculated in 1889. A fellow student who matriculated at Girton at the same time as Maddison was Grace Chisholm . Maddison attended lectures at Cambridge by Cayley, Whitehead and Young. In 1892 Maddison passed the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos Exam earning a First Class degree, equal to the twenty-seventh Wrangler, but she w...
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Wilhelm Franz Meyer
1856 - 1934 (78 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Franz Meyer was a German mathematician and one of the main editors of the Encyclopädie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften. Life and work Meyer studied in the universities of Leipzig and Munich. In 1878, he was awarded a doctorate by Munich. He studied further in Berlin under Weierstrass, Kummer and Kronecker. In 1880, he got the venia legendi at the University of Tübingen. In 1888, he became a full professor at the Bergakademie of Clausthal . From October 1897 until October 1924, when he retired, he taught at the University of Königsberg.
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