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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,

#9551

Louis Bachelier

Louis Bachelier

1870 - 1946 (76 years)

Louis Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Bachelier was a French mathematician at the turn of the 20th century. He is credited with being the first person to model the stochastic process now called Brownian motion, as part of his doctoral thesis The Theory of Speculation .

#9552

Henry Louis Smith

1859 - 1951 (92 years)

Henry Louis Smith was the ninth president of Davidson College and the first president to not be an ordained Presbyterian minister. Originally from Greensboro, North Carolina, Smith graduated from Davidson in 1881 but returned as a professor of physics before becoming president in 1901. It was during his time as a professor that Smith and a group of students created one of the first x-ray images in America.

#9553

Charles Thompson Sullivan

1884 - 1948 (64 years)

Charles Thompson Sullivan, was a Canadian mathematician. Education and career Sullivan graduated with B.A. in 1906 from Dalhousie University and was Science Master at Alberta College, Edmonton from 1906 to 1908. He enrolled as a graduate student in 1908 at McGill University and graduated there with M.Sc. in 1909. In 1910 he became a lecturer in mathematics at McGill. At the University of Chicago he attended summer quarters in 1909 and in 1910 and 4 consecutive quarters in 1911-1912, graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1912. His thesis advisor was Ernest Julius Wilczynski.

#9554

Fibonacci

1170 - Present (856 years)

Fibonacci , also known as Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, or Leonardo Bigollo Pisano , was an Italian mathematician from the Republic of Pisa, considered to be "the most talented Western mathematician of the Middle Ages".

#9555

J. C. P. Miller

1906 - 1981 (75 years)

Jeffrey Charles Percy Miller was an English mathematician and computing pioneer. He worked in number theory and on geometry, particularly polyhedra, where Miller's monster refers to the great dirhombicosidodecahedron.

#9556

William James Sidis

William James Sidis

1898 - 1944 (46 years)

William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He wrote the book The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925 , in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.

#9557

Alexander Gelfond

1906 - 1968 (62 years)

Alexander Osipovich Gelfond was a Soviet mathematician. Gelfond's theorem, also known as the Gelfond-Schneider theorem is named after him. Biography Alexander Gelfond was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, the son of a professional physician and amateur philosopher Osip Gelfond. He entered Moscow State University in 1924, started his postgraduate studies there in 1927, and obtained his Ph.D. in 1930. His advisors were Aleksandr Khinchin and Vyacheslav Stepanov.

#9558

Joseph Pérès

1890 - 1962 (72 years)

Joseph Pérès was a French mathematician. Early life and education Pérès was born in Clermont-Ferrand on 31 October 1890. Former student of the Ecole Normale Superieure, he worked in Rome with Vito Volterra and defended his doctoral thesis in 1915.

#9559

R. Catesby Taliaferro

1907 - 1989 (82 years)

Robert Catesby Taliaferro was an American mathematician, science historian, classical philologist, philosopher, and translator of ancient Greek and Latin works into English. An Episcopalian from an old Virginia family, he taught in the mathematics department of the University of Notre Dame. He is cited as R. Catesby Taliaferro or R. C. Taliaferro.

#9560

Amedeo Agostini

1892 - 1958 (66 years)

Amedeo Agostini was an Italian mathematician born in Capugnano di Porretta Terme. Biography In 1919 he graduated at the University of Bologna, where he later worked on a freelance basis as teaching assistant and professor of History of Mathematics. Since 1925 he taught analytical geometry at the Naval Academy in Livorno. Agostini also held - on assignment - several lectures at the University of Pisa. He dealt mainly with the history of mathematics following the principles of his own teacher, Ettore Bortolotti, emphasizing the assessment of the facts more than their synthesis.

#9561

Ernst Stueckelberg

Ernst Stueckelberg

1905 - 1984 (79 years)

Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg was a Swiss mathematician and physicist, regarded as one of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century. Despite making key advances in theoretical physics, including the exchange particle model of fundamental forces, causal S-matrix theory, and the renormalization group, his idiosyncratic style and publication in minor journals led to his work not being widely recognized until the mid-1990s.

#9562

Paul Flamant

1892 - 1940 (48 years)

Paul Flamant was a French mathematician, known as the transcriber and editor of Gaston Julia's lectures published in the important monograph Leçons sur les Fonctions Uniformes à Point Singulier Essentiel Isolé . According to Joseph Ritt, "Julia's monograph is probably one of the finest in the Borel collection."

#9563

İlhan Koman

1921 - 1986 (65 years)

İlhan Koman was a Turkish sculptor. Between 1951 and 1958, he worked at the Istanbul Fine Arts Academy, before moving to Sweden in 1959. His distinct style of mixing science and art in his works earned him a unique position among contemporary artists, for which he was referred to as the Turkish Da Vinci. His most famous and most talked about work in the field of figurative abstraction is his sculpture Akdeniz.

#9564

Nikolai Chudakov

1904 - 1986 (82 years)

Nikolai Grigor'evich Chudakov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician. He was born in Lysovsk, Novo-Burassk, Saratov, Russian Empire. His father worked as a medical assistant. Biography He first studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Saratov State University, but then he transferred to Moscow University. He then graduated in 1927. In 1930, he was named head of higher mathematics at Saratov University. In 1936, he successfully defended his thesis and became a Doctor of Science. Among others, he considerably improved a result from Guido Hoheisel and Hans Heilbronn on an upper bound for prime gaps.

#9565

Cornelis Simon Meijer

1904 - 1974 (70 years)

Cornelis Simon Meijer was a Dutch mathematician at the University of Groningen who introduced the Meijer G-function, a very general function that includes most of the elementary and higher mathematical functions as special cases; he also introduced generalizations of the Laplace transform that are referred to as Meijer transforms.

#9566

Guido Toja

1870 - 1933 (63 years)

Guido Toja was an Italian actuary and president of the Istituto Italiano delle Assicurazioni. Toja received his laurea in engineering from the Sapienza University of Rome. He started his career in insurance as an actuary for Fondiaria Vita, then the largest Italian life insurance company. He taught financial mathematics at Bocconi University in Milan. He then held important positions in the Italian insurance field, notably the presidency of the Istituto Italiano delle Assicurazioni. As president, Toja commissioned as the architect for the new headquarters of the Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni in Rome.

#9567

Rolin Wavre

1896 - 1949 (53 years)

Rolin-Louis Wavre was a Swiss mathematician. Wavre studied at the Sorbonne and received his Ph.D. in 1921 from the University of Geneva, where he became a professor extraordinarius in 1922, and a professor ordinarius in 1934 . Wavre did research on, among other subjects, logic and the philosophy of mathematics, in which he was an adherent of Brouwer's intuitionism. Independently of, and almost simultaneously with, Leon Lichtenstein, he dealt with equilibrium figures of a heterogeneous fluid mass, with a view to applications to planetary systems in astrophysics.

#9568

Oscar Phelps Austin

1848 - 1933 (85 years)

Oscar Phelps Austin was an American statistician. The earlier years of his life were spent in journalism, and he served as reporter, editor, and correspondent. Life and career Early life Austin was born in Newark, Illinois, to Benjamin Austin, a farmer and state legislator of Nebraska and Emeline Phelps. Toward's the end of the Civil War, Oscar served in the Union Army.

#9569

Elgy Johnson

1912 - 1987 (75 years)

Elgy Sibley Johnson was a mathematician and professor at University of the District of Columbia from the school's foundation in 1976 until his retirement in 1983. Johnson had formerly been the acting president of Federal City College from 1972 through 1974 where he chaired the mathematics department.

#9570

John Shaw Billings

John Shaw Billings

1838 - 1913 (75 years)

John Shaw Billings was an American librarian, building designer, and surgeon who modernized the Library of the Surgeon General's Office in the United States Army. His work with Andrew Carnegie led to the development and his service as the first director of the New York Public Library. Billings oversaw the building of the Surgeon General's Library, which was the nation's first comprehensive library for medicine.

#9571

Otto Frostman

1907 - 1977 (70 years)

Otto Albin Frostman was a Swedish mathematician, known for his work in potential theory and complex analysis. Frostman earned his Ph.D. in 1935 at Lund University under the Hungarian-born mathematician Marcel Riesz, the younger brother of Frigyes Riesz. In potential theory, Frostman's lemma is named after him. He supervised the 1971 Stockholm University Ph.D. thesis of Bernt Lindström, which initiated the "Stockholm School" of topological combinatorics .

#9572

Geoffrey Thomas Bennett

Geoffrey Thomas Bennett

1868 - 1943 (75 years)

Geoffrey Thomas Bennett OBE was an English mathematician, professor at the University of Cambridge. Life and work Born in London, he began his secondary studies at the University College School, under Robert Tucker. After one year at University College of London, Bennett obtained a scholarship at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1890 as Senior Wrangler. However, the best grade in the Mathematical Tripos of that year was for Philippa Fawcett, but she was not included in the list for her gender.

#9573

Arvi Grotenfelt

Arvi Grotenfelt

1863 - 1941 (78 years)

Arvid Grotenfelt , was a Finnish philosopher and psychologist. He was one of the founders of the Finnish Science Academy and the chairman of the Finnish Philosophical society 1905–36. He was also founder and first chairman of the Sällskapet för Psykisk Forskning . He has studied for Wilhelm Wundt and Rudolf Eucken, and written on the subject of history philosophy. In his mind historiography is always estimating, as when it comes to the selection of sources, and this can be connected to weltanschauung.

#9574

Theodoor Jacobus Boks

1893 - 1901 (8 years)

Theodoor Jacobus Boks was a Dutch mathematician working on analysis. Boks obtained his PhD cum laude at Utrecht University in 1921 with the dissertation "Sur les rapports entre les méthodes d'intégration de Riemann et de Lebesgue".

#9575

Karel Rychlík

1885 - 1968 (83 years)

Karel Rychlík was a Czechoslovak mathematician who contributed significantly to the fields of algebra, number theory, mathematical analysis, and the history of mathematics. External links Extensive BiographyWorks

#9576

Émile Cotton

1872 - 1950 (78 years)

Émile Clément Cotton was a professor of mathematics at the University of Grenoble. His PhD thesis studied differential geometry in three dimensions, with the introduction of the Cotton tensor. He held the professorship from 1904 until his 1942 retirement. He was the brother of Aimé Cotton.

#9577

Paul Wolfskehl

1856 - 1906 (50 years)

Paul Friedrich Wolfskehl , was a physician with an interest in mathematics. He bequeathed 100,000 marks to the first person to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. He was the younger of two sons of a banker, Joseph Carl Theodor Wolfskehl. His elder brother, the jurist Wilhelm Otto Wolfskehl, took over the family bank after the death of his father. From 1875 to 1880 Paul Wolfskehl studied medicine at the Universities of Leipzig, Tübingen and Heidelberg. In 1880 he received his doctorate from the Heidelberg University. At about this time, he began to suffer from multiple sclerosis, which eventually forced him to pursue another career.

#9578

Harold Row

Richard Williams Harold Row was a philatelist who was one of the "Fathers of Philately" entered on the Roll of Distinguished Philatelists in 1921. Row was an expert on the stamps of Siam and after his death, his collection was donated to the British Museum by his mother, Mrs Eliza Row. The Row Collection now forms part of the British Library Philatelic Collections. It covers the period 1883 to 1918 in 22 volumes and is mainly of unused material with many blocks, and strong in the various provisional surcharges. It also includes some postal stationery and issues used in Kedah and Kelantan.

#9579

Maria Adelaide Sneider

1937 - 1989 (52 years)

Maria Adelaide Sneider was an Italian mathematician working on numerical and mathematical analysis. She is known for her work on the theory of electrostatic capacities of non-smooth closed hypersurfaces: Apart from the development of precise estimates for the numerical approximation of the electrostatic capacity of the unit cube, this work also led her to give a rigorous proof of Green's identities for large classes of hypersurfaces with singularities, and later to develop an accurate mathematical analysis of the points effect. She is also known for her contributions to the Dirichlet problem...

#9580

Webster Wells

1851 - 1916 (65 years)

Webster Wells was an American mathematician known primarily for his authorship of mathematical textbooks. Early life and career Webster Wells was born at Roxbury, Massachusetts on September 4, 1851. His parents, Thomas Foster Wells and Sarah Morrill Wells , initially named him Thomas Wells, but presumably after the death of the statesman Daniel Webster in 1852, renamed him Daniel Webster Wells, and from at least 1860, he was known as Webster Wells. Samuel Adams, the Boston brewer and patriot, was a great-great-grandfather, and the poets Thomas Wells and Anna Maria Wells were grandparents....

#9581

Gustave Dumas

1872 - 1955 (83 years)

Gustave Dumas was a Swiss mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry. Dumas received a baccalaureate degree from the University of Lausanne, then another baccalaureate degree from the Sorbonne, and in 1904 a doctoral degree from the Sorbonne with dissertation Sur les fonctions à caractère algébrique dans le voisinage d'un point donné. In 1906 he obtained his habilitation qualification from Zürich's Federal Polytechnic School with habilitation dissertation Sur quelques cas d'irréductibilité des polynômes à coefficients rationnels. From 1906 to 1913 Dumas taught higher mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic School.

#9582

Paul Mahlo

1883 - 1971 (88 years)

Friedrich Paul Mahlo was a German mathematician. Mahlo introduced Mahlo cardinals in 1911. He also showed that the continuum hypothesis implies the existence of a Luzin set. Publications PhD dissertation

#9583

George Adolphus Schott

1868 - 1937 (69 years)

George Adolphus Schott FRS was a British mathematician. He is best known for developing the full theory of radiation from electrons travelling at close to the speed of light. Born in Bradford to German parents, he was educated at Bradford Grammar School and later studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1890. After obtaining his Doctor of Science he became assistant lecturer to D.M. Lewis in the Department of Physics. After a years leave, in which he travelled to Germany, he became lecturer of Applied Mathematics at Aberystwyth University, where he would spend the rest of his career.

#9584

Kelly Miller

1863 - 1939 (76 years)

Kelly Miller was an American mathematician, sociologist, essayist, newspaper columnist, author, and an important figure in the intellectual life of black America for close to half a century. He was known as "the Bard of the Potomac".

#9585

Henri Béghin

1876 - 1969 (93 years)

Henri Béghin was a French professor of mathematical and applied mechanics. Béghin's was born in Lille where his father was an engineer trained at the École Polytechnique who was involved in founding the Northern Railway Company. Béghin went to the École normale supérieure , where his contemporaries included Paul Montel, Henri Lebesgue, Paul Langevin, and Charles Péguy. He became a chair of applied mechanics at the University of Lille in 1924. He trained students of the Naval Academy from 1899 to 1921. His work included studies to develop a high precision gyro-compass and a gyro-stabilized sextant for use with ship-mounted guns.

#9586

Silvio Ballarin

1901 - 1969 (68 years)

Silvio Ballarin was a Dalmatian Italian mathematician and university professor. He was born in Zara in 1901, which at the time was still part of Austria-Hungary. He graduated in mathematics from the University of Bologna in 1924. Ballarin taught topography at the University of Pisa starting from 1950. He was principally interested in gravimetry and geodesy. Ballarin performed many gravimetric measurements in Italy.

#9587

Theodor Kaluza

1885 - 1954 (69 years)

Theodor Franz Eduard Kaluza was a German mathematician and physicist known for the Kaluza–Klein theory, involving field equations in five-dimensional space-time. His idea that fundamental forces can be unified by introducing additional dimensions were reused much later for string theory.

#9588

Gheorghe Țițeica

Gheorghe Țițeica

1873 - 1939 (66 years)

Gheorghe Țițeica publishing as George or Georges Tzitzéica Education He was born in Turnu Severin, western Oltenia, the son of Anca and Radu Țiței, originally from Cilibia, in Buzău County. His name was registered as Țițeica–a combination of his parents' surnames. He showed an early interest in science, as well as music and literature. Țițeica was an accomplished violinist, having studied music since childhood: music was to remain his hobby. While studying at the Carol I High School in Craiova, he contributed to the school's magazine, writing the columns on mathematics and studies of literary critique.

#9589

Cyparissos Stephanos

1857 - 1917 (60 years)

Cyparissos Stephanos He was an author, mathematician, and professor. He was a pioneer in 20th century projective geometry. He studied with Vassilios Lakon. Lakon and Stephanos were from the island of Kea. Stephanos furthered his studies in France following the same path of Timoleon Argyropoulos, Dimitrios Stroumpos, and Vassilios Lakon. In France, Stephanos studied with Jean Gaston Darboux, Camille Jordan, and Charles Hermite. Jean Gaston Darboux was his doctoral advisor. He wrote articles in the fields of mathematical analysis, higher algebra, theoretical mechanics, and topology. He published around twenty-five original works in European journals.

#9590

Paul Montel

1876 - 1975 (99 years)

Paul Antoine Aristide Montel was a French mathematician. He was born in Nice, France and died in Paris, France. He researched mostly on holomorphic functions in complex analysis. Montel was a student of Émile Borel at the Sorbonne. Henri Cartan, Jean Dieudonné and Miron Nicolescu were among his students.

#9591

Ralph Tambs Lyche

Ralph Tambs Lyche

1890 - 1991 (101 years)

Ralph Tambs Lyche was a Norwegian mathematician. He was born in Macon, Georgia as a son of Norwegian father Hans Tambs Lyche and American mother Mary Rebecca Godden . He moved to Norway at the age of two. He finished his secondary education in Fredrikstad in 1908, and was hired as an assistant for Richard Birkeland at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1910. At the same time he studied at the Royal Frederick University, graduating with the cand.real. degree in 1916.

#9592

Paul Mansion

1844 - 1919 (75 years)

Paul Mansion was a Belgian mathematician, editor of the journal Mathesis. Life and work Mansion was the ninth of the ten brothers. His father died when he was only a baby and he was brought up by his mother and his older brothers. He studied at Huy school and high school. In 1862 he entered in the École Normale des Sciences, attached to the University of Ghent, where he graduated in 1865. From this time till 1867 he taught mathematics in the artillery academy in Ghent, while he was working in his doctoral thesis. He was awarded PhD in 1867.

#9593

Raoul Bricard

1870 - 1943 (73 years)

Raoul Bricard was a French engineer and a mathematician. He is best known for his work in geometry, especially descriptive geometry and scissors congruence, and kinematics, especially mechanical linkages.

#9594

Gyula Farkas

1847 - 1930 (83 years)

Gyula Farkas de Kisbarnak or Julius Farkas de Kisbarnak was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist. Biography Farkas was born on March 28, 1847, in Sárosd, Hungary. He was the eldest of seven children in a Roman Catholic Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak, which can trace back their origins to the first half of the 17th century. His father was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys; his mother was Cecília Hoffmann . His paternal grandparents were János Farkas de Kisbarnak , state administrator of Súr and Anna Fiber. His maternal grandparents were István Hoffmann, states cashier and Rozália Vitmáier.

#9595

Désiré André

1840 - 1917 (77 years)

Désiré André was a French mathematician, best known for his work on Catalan numbers and alternating permutations. Biography He is the son of Auguste Antoine Désiré André, shoemaker in Lyon, and his wife Antoinette Magdalene Jar.

#9596

Eugène Cosserat

Eugène Cosserat

1866 - 1931 (65 years)

Eugène-Maurice-Pierre Cosserat was a French mathematician and astronomer. Born in Amiens, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1883 to 1888. He was on Science faculty of Toulouse University from 1889 and director of its observatory from 1908, a position he held for the rest of his life. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1919.

#9597

David Hilbert

1862 - 1943 (81 years)

David Hilbert was a German mathematician and one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas including invariant theory, the calculus of variations, commutative algebra, algebraic number theory, the foundations of geometry, spectral theory of operators and its application to integral equations, mathematical physics, and the foundations of mathematics .

#9598

Euclid

333 BC - 285 BC (48 years)

Euclid was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the Elements treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely dominated the field until the early 19th century. His system, now referred to as Euclidean geometry, involved new innovations in combination with a synthesis of theories from earlier Greek mathematicians, including Eudoxus of Cnidus, Hippocrates of Chios, and Theaetetus. With Archimedes and Apollonius of Perga, Euclid is generally considered among the greatest mathematicians o...

#9599

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss

1777 - 1855 (78 years)

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician, geodesist, and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Gauss ranks among history's most influential mathematicians. He has been referred to as the "Prince of Mathematicians".

#9600

Leonhard Euler

1707 - 1783 (76 years)

Leonhard Euler was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician, and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in many other branches of mathematics such as analytic number theory, complex analysis, and infinitesimal calculus. He introduced much of modern mathematical terminology and notation, including the notion of a mathematical function. He is also known for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy, and music theory.

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