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,
#9651
Ashutosh Mukherjee
1864 - 1924 (60 years)
Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee was a prolific Bengali educator, jurist, barrister and mathematician. He was the first student to be awarded a dual degree from Calcutta University. Perhaps the most emphatic figure of Indian education, he was a man of great personality, high self-respect, courage and towering administrative ability. The second Indian Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta for four consecutive two-year terms and a fifth two-year term , Mukherjee was responsible for the foundation of the Bengal Technical Institute in 1906, which was later known as Jadavpur University and the U...
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Edward Routh
1831 - 1907 (76 years)
Edward John Routh was an English mathematician, noted as the outstanding coach of students preparing for the Mathematical Tripos examination of the University of Cambridge in its heyday in the middle of the nineteenth century. He also did much to systematise the mathematical theory of mechanics and created several ideas critical to the development of modern control systems theory.
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Otto Hesse
1811 - 1874 (63 years)
Ludwig Otto Hesse was a German mathematician. Hesse was born in Königsberg, Prussia, and died in Munich, Bavaria. He worked mainly on algebraic invariants, and geometry. The Hessian matrix, the Hesse normal form, the Hesse configuration, the Hessian group, Hessian pairs, Hesse's theorem, Hesse pencil, and the Hesse transfer principle are named after him. Many of Hesse's research findings were presented for the first time in Crelle's Journal or Hesse's textbooks.
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Vladimir Smirnov
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov was a mathematician who made significant contributions in both pure and applied mathematics, and also in the history of mathematics. Smirnov worked on diverse areas of mathematics, such as complex functions and conjugate functions in Euclidean spaces. In the applied field his work includes the propagation of waves in elastic media with plane boundaries and the oscillations of elastic spheres. His pioneering approach to solving the initial-boundary value problem to the wave equation formed the basis of the spacetime triangle diagram technique for wave motion devel...
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Mary Everest Boole
1832 - 1916 (84 years)
Mary Everest Boole was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole. Her progressive ideas on education, as expounded in The Preparation of the Child for Science, included encouraging children to explore mathematics through playful activities such as curve stitching. Her life is of interest to feminists as an example of how women made careers in an academic system that did not welcome them.
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Salvatore Pincherle
1853 - 1936 (83 years)
Salvatore Pincherle was an Italian mathematician. He contributed significantly to the field of functional analysis, established the Italian Mathematical Union , and was president of the Third International Congress of Mathematicians. The Pincherle derivative is named after him.
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Gordon Welchman
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
William Gordon Welchman OBE was a British mathematician. During World War II, he worked at Britain's secret decryption centre at Bletchley Park, where he was one of the most important contributors.
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Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin was a Soviet mathematician, who made numerous contributions in algebraic topology, geometry, measure theory, probability theory, ergodic theory and entropy theory. Life Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, to a wealthy Jewish family. His mother, Henrietta Emmanuilovna Levenson, had studied medicine in France . His maternal grandmother, Clara Levenson, had been one of the first female doctors in Russia. His maternal grandfather Emmanuil Levenson was a wealthy businessman . Vladimir Rokhlin's father Abram Veniaminovich Rokhlin was a well-known ...
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Stanisław Zaremba
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Stanisław Zaremba was a Polish mathematician and engineer. His research in partial differential equations, applied mathematics and classical analysis, particularly on harmonic functions, gained him a wide recognition. He was one of the mathematicians who contributed to the success of the Polish School of Mathematics through his teaching and organizational skills as well as through his research. Apart from his research works, Zaremba wrote many university textbooks and monographies.
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Karl Georg Christian von Staudt
1798 - 1867 (69 years)
Karl Georg Christian von Staudt was a German mathematician who used synthetic geometry to provide a foundation for arithmetic. Life and influence Karl was born in the Free Imperial City of Rothenburg, which is now called Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany. From 1814 he studied in Gymnasium in Ausbach. He attended the University of Göttingen from 1818 to 1822 where he studied with Gauss who was director of the observatory. Staudt provided an ephemeris for the orbits of Mars and the asteroid Pallas. When in 1821 Comet Nicollet-Pons was observed, he provided the elements of its orbit. These ac...
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Friedrich Hartogs
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
Friedrich Moritz "Fritz" Hartogs was a German-Jewish mathematician, known for his work on set theory and foundational results on several complex variables. Life Hartogs was the son of the merchant Gustav Hartogs and his wife Elise Feist and grew up in Frankfurt am Main. He studied at the Königliche Technische Hochschule Hannover, at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, at the University of Berlin, and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, graduating with a doctorate in 1903 . He did his Habilitation in 1905 and was Privatdozent and Professor in Munich . As a Jew, he suffered gr...
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Percy Alexander MacMahon
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Percy Alexander MacMahon was an English mathematician, especially noted in connection with the partitions of numbers and enumerative combinatorics. Early life Percy MacMahon was born in Malta to a British military family. His father was a colonel at the time, retired in the rank of the brigadier. MacMahon attended the Proprietary School in Cheltenham. At the age of 14 he won a Junior Scholarship to Cheltenham College, which he attended as a day boy from 10 February 1868 until December 1870. At the age of 16 MacMahon was admitted to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich and passed out after two...
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John Edward Campbell
1862 - 1924 (62 years)
John Edward Campbell was a mathematician, best known for his contribution to the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula. Biography Campbell was born in a family of a doctor, also named John Campbell. He studied first at the Methodist College in Belfast and then at Queen's University Belfast, graduating in 1884. He then won a scholarship to study at the Oxford University, at Hertford College. There he won the Junior Mathematical University Scholarship in 1885, became a College Fellow in 1887, obtained a Senior Scholarship in 1888, and eventually became a tutor. Campbell was noted as a charming and h...
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Ivan Vinogradov
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov was a Soviet mathematician, who was one of the creators of modern analytic number theory, and also a dominant figure in mathematics in the USSR. He was born in the Velikiye Luki district, Pskov Oblast. He graduated from the University of St. Petersburg, where in 1920 he became a Professor. From 1934 he was a Director of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, a position he held for the rest of his life, except for the five-year period when the institute was directed by Academician Sergei Sobolev. In 1941 he was awarded the Stalin Prize. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1942.
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David Eugene Smith
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
David Eugene Smith was an American mathematician, educator, and editor. Education and career David Eugene Smith is considered one of the founders of the field of mathematics education. Smith was born in Cortland, New York, to Abram P. Smith, attorney and surrogate judge, and Mary Elizabeth Bronson, who taught her young son Latin and Greek. He attended Syracuse University, graduating in 1881 . He studied to be a lawyer concentrating in arts and humanities, but accepted an instructorship in mathematics at the Cortland Normal School in 1884 where he attended as a young man. While at the Cortla...
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Mihailo Petrović Alas
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Mihailo Petrović Alas , was a Serbian mathematician and inventor. He was also a distinguished professor at Belgrade University, an academic, fisherman, philosopher, writer, publicist, musician, businessman, traveler and volunteer in the Balkan Wars, the First and Second World Wars. He was a student of Henri Poincaré, Paul Painlevé, Charles Hermite and Émile Picard. Petrović contributed significantly to the study of differential equations and phenomenology, founded engineering mathematics in Serbia, and invented one of the first prototypes of a hydraulic analog computer.
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Qusta ibn Luqa
820 - 912 (92 years)
Qusta ibn Luqa, also known as Costa ben Luca or Constabulus was a Syrian Melkite Christian physician, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and translator. He was born in Baalbek. Travelling to parts of the Byzantine Empire, he brought back Greek texts and translated them into Arabic.
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Giovanni Frattini
1852 - 1925 (73 years)
Giovanni Frattini was an Italian mathematician, noted for his contributions to group theory. Biography Frattini entered the University of Rome in 1869, where he studied mathematics with Giuseppe Battaglini, Eugenio Beltrami, and Luigi Cremona, obtaining his Laurea in 1875.
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Robert Fricke
1861 - 1930 (69 years)
Karl Emanuel Robert Fricke was a German mathematician, known for his work in complex analysis, especially on elliptic, modular and automorphic functions. He was one of the main collaborators of Felix Klein, with whom he produced two classic, two-volume monographs on elliptic modular functions and automorphic functions.
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Hidehiko Yamabe
1923 - 1960 (37 years)
was a Japanese mathematician. Above all, he is famous for discovering that every conformal class on a smooth compact manifold is represented by a Riemannian metric of constant scalar curvature. Other notable contributions include his definitive solution of Hilbert's fifth problem.
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Helge von Koch
1870 - 1924 (54 years)
Niels Fabian Helge von Koch was a Swedish mathematician who gave his name to the famous fractal known as the Koch snowflake, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described. He was born to Swedish nobility. His grandfather, Nils Samuel von Koch , was the Chancellor of Justice. His father, Richert Vogt von Koch was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Life Guards of Horse of the Swedish Army. He was enrolled at the newly created Stockholm University College in 1887 , and at Uppsala University in 1888, where he also received his bachelor's degree since the non-governmental college in Stockholm had not yet received the rights to issue degrees.
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Heinz Prüfer
1896 - 1934 (38 years)
Ernst Paul Heinz Prüfer was a German Jewish mathematician born in Wilhelmshaven. His major contributions were on abelian groups, graph theory, algebraic numbers, knot theory and Sturm–Liouville theory.
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Robert Simson
1687 - 1768 (81 years)
Robert Simson was a Scottish mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow. The Simson line is named after him. Biography Robert Simson was born on 14 October 1687, probably the eldest of the seventeen children, all male, of John Simson, a Glasgow merchant, and Agnes, daughter of Patrick Simson, minister of Renfrew; only six of them reached adulthood.
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Simon Antoine Jean L'Huilier
1750 - 1840 (90 years)
Simon Antoine Jean L'Huilier was a Swiss mathematician of French Huguenot descent. He is known for his work in mathematical analysis and topology, and in particular the generalization of Euler's formula for planar graphs.
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Ivar Otto Bendixson
1861 - 1935 (74 years)
Ivar Otto Bendixson was a Swedish mathematician. Biography Bendixson was born on 1 August 1861 at Villa Bergshyddan, Djurgården, Oscar Parish, Stockholm, Sweden, to a middle-class family. His father Vilhelm Emanuel Bendixson was a merchant, and his mother was Tony Amelia Warburg. On completing secondary education in Stockholm, he obtained his school certificate on 25 May 1878.
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Wilhelm Cauer
1900 - 1945 (45 years)
Wilhelm Cauer was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specific...
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Georgiy Shilov
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Georgi Evgen'evich Shilov was a Soviet mathematician and expert in the field of functional analysis, who contributed to the theory of normed ringss and generalized functions. He was born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. After graduating from Moscow State University in 1938, he served in the army during World War II. He earned a doctorate in physical-mathematical sciences in 1951, also at MSU, and briefly taught at Kyiv University until returning as a professor at MSU in 1954. There, he supervised over 40 graduate students, including Mikhail Agranovich, Valentina Borok, Gregory Eskin, and Arkadi Nemirovski.
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David Brewster
1781 - 1868 (87 years)
Sir David Brewster KH PRSE FRS FSA Scot FSSA MICE was a Scottish scientist, inventor, author, and academic administrator. In science he is principally remembered for his experimental work in physical optics, mostly concerned with the study of the polarization of light and including the discovery of Brewster's angle. He studied the birefringence of crystals under compression and discovered photoelasticity, thereby creating the field of optical mineralogy. For this work, William Whewell dubbed him the "father of modern experimental optics" and "the Johannes Kepler of optics."
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William Henry Young
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
William Henry Young FRS was an English mathematician. Young was educated at City of London School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He worked on measure theory, Fourier series, differential calculus, amongst other fields, and made contributions to the study of functions of several complex variables. He was the husband of Grace Chisholm Young, with whom he authored and co-authored 214 papers and 4 books. Two of their children became professional mathematicians . Young's Theorem was named after him.
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Nikolai Brashman
1796 - 1866 (70 years)
Nikolai Dmitrievich Brashman was a Russian mathematician of Jewish-Austrian origin. He was a student of Joseph Johann Littrow, and the advisor of Pafnuty Chebyshev and August Davidov. He was born in Neu-Raußnitz and studied at the University of Vienna and Vienna Polytechnic Institute. In 1824 he moved to Saint Petersburg and then accepted a position at the Kazan University. In 1834 he became a professor of applied mathematics at the Moscow University. There he is best remembered as a founder of the Moscow Mathematical Society and its journal Matematicheskii Sbornik.
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George Green
1793 - 1841 (48 years)
George Green was a British mathematical physicist who wrote An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism in 1828. The essay introduced several important concepts, among them a theorem similar to the modern Green's theorem, the idea of potential functions as currently used in physics, and the concept of what are now called Green's functions. Green was the first person to create a mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism and his theory formed the foundation for the work of other scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, and others.
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Pavel Florensky
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, inventor, polymath, neomartyr and folk saint. During the later twentieth century, statements had appeared noting a recognition by the Russian Orthodox Church of him as a saint, though it was later firmly noted that no such decision had been made.
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Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant
1797 - 1886 (89 years)
Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant was a mechanician and mathematician who contributed to early stress analysis and also developed the unsteady open channel flow shallow water equations, also known as the Saint-Venant equations that are a fundamental set of equations used in modern hydraulic engineering. The one-dimensional Saint-Venant equation is a commonly used simplification of the shallow water equations. Although his full surname was Barré de Saint-Venant in mathematical literature other than French he is known as Saint-Venant. His name is also associated with Saint-Venant's prin...
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Cornelius Lanczos
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Cornelius Lanczos was a Hungarian-Jewish, Hungarian-American and later Hungarian-Irish mathematician and physicist. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians. Biography He was born in Fehérvár , Fejér County, Kingdom of Hungary to Jewish parents, Károly Lőwy and Adél Hahn. Lanczos' Ph.D. thesis was on relativity theory. He sent his thesis copy to Albert Einstein, and Einstein wrote back, saying: "I studied your paper as far as my present overload allowed. I believe I may say this much: this does involve competent and original brainwork, on the basis of which a doctorate should be obtainable ...
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Frans van Schooten
1615 - 1660 (45 years)
Frans van Schooten Jr. also rendered as Franciscus van Schooten was a Dutch mathematician who is most known for popularizing the analytic geometry of René Descartes. Life Van Schooten's father, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Leiden, having Christiaan Huygens, Johann van Waveren Hudde, and René de Sluze as students.
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Olinde Rodrigues
1795 - 1851 (56 years)
Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues , more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician, and social reformer. In mathematics Rodrigues is remembered for Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula about series of orthogonal polynomials and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters.
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Émile Léonard Mathieu
1835 - 1890 (55 years)
Émile Léonard Mathieu was a French mathematician. He is known for his work in group theory and mathematical physics. He has given his name to the Mathieu functions, Mathieu groups and Mathieu transformation. He authored a treatise of mathematical physics in 6 volumes. Volume 1 is an exposition of the techniques to solve the differential equations of mathematical physics, and contains an account of the applications of Mathieu functions to electrostatics. Volume 2 deals with capillarity. Volumes 3 and 4 deal with electrostatics and magnetostatics. Volume 5 deals with electrodynamics, and volume 6 with elasticity.
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John Playfair
1748 - 1819 (71 years)
John Playfair FRSE, FRS was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth , which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
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George Abram Miller
1863 - 1951 (88 years)
George Abram Miller was an early group theorist. Biography At the age of seventeen, Miller began school-teaching to raise funds for higher education. In 1882, he entered Franklin and Marshall Academy, and progressed to Muhlenberg College in 1884. He received his B.A. in 1887 and M.A. in 1890.
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Percy John Heawood
1861 - 1955 (94 years)
Percy John Heawood was a British mathematician, who concentrated on graph colouring. Life He was the son of the Rev. John Richard Heawood of Newport, Shropshire, and his wife Emily Heath, daughter of the Rev. Joseph Heath of Wigmore, Herefordshire; and a first cousin of Oliver Lodge, whose mother Grace was also a daughter of Joseph Heath. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth's School, Ipswich, and matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1880, graduating B.A. in 1883 and M.A. in 1887.
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Josef Stefan
1835 - 1893 (58 years)
Josef Stefan was a Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire. Life and work Stefan was born in the village of St. Peter on the outskirts of KlagenfurtAleksander1805-18721815-1863.
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Florence Nightingale
1820 - 1910 (90 years)
Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She significantly reduced death rates by improving hygiene and living standards. Nightingale gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.
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Abraham Gotthelf Kästner
1719 - 1800 (81 years)
Abraham Gotthelf Kästner was a German mathematician and epigrammatist. He was known in his professional life for writing textbooks and compiling encyclopedias rather than for original research. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was one of his doctoral students, and admired the man greatly. He became most well-known for his epigrammatic poems. The crater Kästner on the Moon is named after him.
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Tadeusz Ważewski
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Tadeusz Ważewski was a Polish mathematician. Ważewski made important contributions to the theory of ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, control theory and the theory of analytic spaces. He is most famous for applying the topological concept of retract, introduced by Karol Borsuk, to the study of the solutions of differential equations.
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Lester R. Ford
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
This is about early- and mid-20th-century mathematician. For his mathematician son, active from the mid-20th century, see L. R. Ford Jr. Lester Randolph Ford Sr. was an American mathematician, editor of the American Mathematical Monthly from 1942 to 1946, and president of the Mathematical Association of America from 1947 to 1948.
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Nikolay Umov
1846 - 1915 (69 years)
Nikolay Alekseevich Umov was a Russian physicist and mathematician known for discovering the concept of Umov-Poynting vector and Umov effect. Biography Umov was born in 1846 in Simbirsk in the family of a military doctor. He graduated from the Physics and Mathematics department of Moscow State University in 1867 and became a Professor of Physics in 1875. He studied theoretical physics by reading works of Gabriel Lamé, Clebsch and Clausius, that made a significant impact on the originality of his later ideas in physics.
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Henry John Stephen Smith
1826 - 1883 (57 years)
Prof Henry John Stephen Smith FRS FRSE FRAS LLD was an Irish mathematician and amateur astronomer remembered for his work in elementary divisors, quadratic forms, and Smith–Minkowski–Siegel mass formula in number theory. In matrix theory he is visible today in having his name on the Smith normal form of a matrix. Smith was also first to discover the Cantor set.
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Lodovico Ferrari
1522 - 1565 (43 years)
Lodovico de Ferrari was an Italian mathematician best known today for solving the quartic equation. Biography Born in Bologna, Lodovico's grandfather, Bartolomeo Ferrari, was forced out of Milan to Bologna. Lodovico settled in Bologna, and he began his career as the servant of Gerolamo Cardano. He was extremely bright, so Cardano started teaching him mathematics. Ferrari aided Cardano on his solutions for quadratic equations and cubic equations, and was mainly responsible for the solution of quartic equations that Cardano published. While still in his teens, Ferrari was able to obtain a prestigious teaching post in Rome after Cardano resigned from it and recommended him.
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Thomas Bradwardine
1300 - 1349 (49 years)
Thomas Bradwardine was an English cleric, scholar, mathematician, physicist, courtier and, very briefly, Archbishop of Canterbury. As a celebrated scholastic philosopher and doctor of theology, he is often called Doctor Profundus .
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Nikolai Piskunov
1908 - 1977 (69 years)
Nikolai Semenovich Piskunov was a Soviet mathematician working mainly in the field of partial differential equations. He is known for the Kolmogorov–Petrovsky–Piskunov equation, a key model in mathematical population dynamics, and his textbook on differential and integral calculus which was used at many technical universities and was translated into several languages.
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