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,
#9901
Stanisław Ruziewicz
1889 - 1941 (52 years)
Stanisław Ruziewicz was a Polish mathematician and one of the founders of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He was a former student of Wacław Sierpiński, earning his doctorate in 1913 from the University of Lwów; his thesis concerned continuous functions that are not differentiable. He became a professor at the same university and rector of the Academy of Foreign Trade in Lwów. During the Second World War, Ruziewicz's home city of Lwów was annexed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but then taken over by the General Government of German-occupied Poland in July 1941; Ruziewicz was arr...
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Carl Anton Bretschneider
1808 - 1878 (70 years)
Carl Anton Bretschneider was a mathematician from Gotha, Germany. Bretschneider worked in geometry, number theory, and history of geometry. He also worked on logarithmic integrals and mathematical tables for Euler's constant when he published his 1837 paper. He is best known for his discovery of Bretschneider's formula for the area of a general quadrilateral on a plane,
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Otto Haupt
1887 - 1988 (101 years)
Otto Haupt was a German mathematician. Biography Haupt obtained his PhD in 1911 under the supervision of Georg Rost and Emil Hilb at the University of Würzburg, and became a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He retired from teaching in 1953, but continued his mathematical research for many subsequent years.
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Sofya Yanovskaya
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Sofya Aleksandrovna Yanovskaya was a Soviet mathematician and historian, specializing in the history of mathematics, mathematical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. She is best known for her efforts in restoring the research of mathematical logic in the Soviet Union and publishing and editing the mathematical works of Karl Marx.
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Lyudmila Keldysh
1904 - 1976 (72 years)
Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was a Soviet mathematician known for set theory and geometric topology. Biography Lyudmila Vsevolodovna Keldysh was born on 12 March 1904 in Orenburg, Russia to Mariya Aleksandrovna and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Keldysh. Her family was descended from Russian nobility and though they were well-to-do before the Russian Revolution, they would later face difficulty because of their heritage. Because her father was a construction expert for the military, they moved frequently and she lived in Helsinki between 1905 and 1907, then in Saint Petersburg until 1909, and then moved to Riga, Latvia.
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Orymbek Zhautykov
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Orymbek Akhmetbekovich Zhautykov was a Kazakh mathematician. His mathematical work focussed on stability theory of motion, equations which govern physics and infinite systems of differential equations. Throughout his life he published many different pieces of work including research papers, textbooks and biographies of mathematicians on their birth/death anniversaries.
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Kazimierz Zarankiewicz
1902 - 1959 (57 years)
Kazimierz Zarankiewicz was a Polish mathematician and Professor at the Warsaw University of Technology who was interested primarily in topology and graph theory. Biography Zarankiewicz was born in Częstochowa to father Stanisław and mother Józefa . He studied at the University of Warsaw, together with Zygmunt Janiszewski, Stefan Mazurkiewicz, Wacław Sierpiński, Kazimierz Kuratowski, and Stanisław Saks.
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Agner Krarup Erlang
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Agner Krarup Erlang was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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Charles Proteus Steinmetz
1865 - 1923 (58 years)
Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a German-American mathematician and electrical engineer and professor at Union College. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. He made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of hysteresis that enabled engineers to design better electromagnetic apparatus equipment, especially electric motorss for use in industry.
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Maria Gaetana Agnesi
1718 - 1799 (81 years)
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university.
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Wilhelm Lexis
1837 - 1914 (77 years)
Wilhelm Lexis , full name Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, was a German statistician, economist, and social scientist. The Oxford Dictionary of Statistics cites him as a "pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series". Lexis is largely remembered for two items that bear his name—the Lexis ratio and the Lexis diagram.
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G. B. Halsted
1853 - 1922 (69 years)
George Bruce Halsted , usually cited as G. B. Halsted, was an American mathematician who explored foundations of geometry and introduced non-Euclidean geometry into the United States through his translations of works by Bolyai, Lobachevski, Saccheri, and Poincaré. He wrote an elementary geometry text, Rational Geometry, based on Hilbert's axioms, which was translated into French, German, and Japanese. Halsted produced original works in synthetic geometry, first with an elementary text in 1896, and with a text on synthetic projective geometry in 1906.
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Adolf Kneser
1862 - 1930 (68 years)
Adolf Kneser was a German mathematician. He was born in Grüssow, Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and died in Breslau, Germany. He is the father of the mathematician Hellmuth Kneser and the grandfather of the mathematician Martin Kneser.
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Edmund Berkeley
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Edmund Callis Berkeley was an American computer scientist who co-founded the Association for Computing Machinery in 1947. His 1949 book Giant Brains, or Machines That Think popularized cognitive images of early computers. He was also a social activist who worked to achieve conditions that might minimize the threat of nuclear war.
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Jost Bürgi
1552 - 1632 (80 years)
Jost Bürgi , active primarily at the courts in Kassel and Prague, was a Swiss clockmaker, a maker of astronomical instruments and a mathematician. Life Bürgi was born in 1552 Lichtensteig, Toggenburg, at the time a subject territory of the Abbey of St. Gall . Not much is known about his life or education before his employment as astronomer and clockmaker at the court of William IV in Kassel in 1579; it has been theorized that he acquired his mathematical knowledge at Strasbourg, among others from Swiss mathematician Conrad Dasypodius, but there are no facts to support this.
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John Monroe Van Vleck
1833 - 1912 (79 years)
John Monroe Van Vleck was an American mathematician and astronomer. He taught astronomy and mathematics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut for more than 50 years , and served as acting university president twice. The Van Vleck Observatory and the crater Van Vleck on the Moon are named after him.
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Ctesibius
284 BC - 221 BC (63 years)
Ctesibius or Ktesibios or Tesibius was a Greek inventor and mathematician in Alexandria, Ptolemaic Egypt. He wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps . This, in combination with his work On pneumatics on the elasticity of air, earned him the title of "father of pneumatics." None of his written work has survived, including his Memorabilia, a compilation of his research that was cited by Athenaeus. Ctesibius' most commonly known invention today is a pipe organ , a predecessor of the modern church organ.
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Richard Montague
1930 - 1971 (41 years)
Richard Merritt Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher who made contributions to mathematical logic and the philosophy of language. He is known for proposing Montague grammar to formalize the semantics of natural language. As a student of Alfred Tarski, he also contributed early developments to axiomatic set theory . For the latter half of his life, he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles until his early death, believed to be a homicide, at age 40.
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Georg Joachim Rheticus
1514 - 1574 (60 years)
Georg Joachim de Porris, also known as Rheticus , was a mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, navigational-instrument maker, medical practitioner, and teacher. He is perhaps best known for his trigonometric tables and as Nicolaus Copernicus's sole pupil. He facilitated the publication of his master's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium .
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Heinrich August Rothe
1773 - 1842 (69 years)
Heinrich August Rothe was a German mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Erlangen. He was a student of Carl Hindenburg and a member of Hindenburg's school of combinatorics. Biography Rothe was born in 1773 in Dresden, and in 1793 became a docent at the University of Leipzig. He became an extraordinary professor at Leipzig in 1796, and in 1804 he moved to Erlangen as a full professor, taking over the chair formerly held by Karl Christian von Langsdorf. He died in 1842, and his position at Erlangen was in turn taken by Johann Wilhelm Pfaff, the brother of the more famous mathematician Jo...
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Olaus Henrici
1840 - 1918 (78 years)
Olaus Magnus Friedrich Erdmann Henrici, FRS was a German mathematician who became a professor in London. After three years as an apprentice in engineering, Henrici entered Karlsruhe Polytechnium where he came under the influence of Alfred Clebsch who encouraged him in mathematics. He then went to Heidelberg where he studied with Otto Hesse. Henrici attained his Dr. phil. degree on 6 June 1863 at University of Heidelberg. He continued his studies in Berlin with Karl Weierstrass and Leopold Kronecker. He was briefly docent of mathematics and physics at the University of Kiel, but ran into finan...
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Ibn al-Banna' al-Marrakushi
1256 - 1321 (65 years)
Ibn al‐Bannāʾ al‐Marrākushī , full name: Abu'l-Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Uthman al-Azdi al-Marrakushi , was a Maghrebi Muslim polymath who was active as a mathematician, astronomer, Islamic scholar, Sufi and astrologer.
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George Darwin
1845 - 1912 (67 years)
Sir George Howard Darwin, was an English barrister and astronomer, the second son and fifth child of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. Biography George H. Darwin was born at Down House, Kent, the fifth child of biologist Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin.
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Andrey Markov Jr.
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Andrey Andreyevich Markov was a Soviet mathematician, the son of the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov Sr, and one of the key founders of the Russian school of constructive mathematics and logic. He made outstanding contributions to various areas of mathematics, including differential equations, topology, mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics.
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Karl Christian von Langsdorf
1757 - 1834 (77 years)
Karl Christian von Langsdorf, also known as Carl Christian von Langsdorff , was a German mathematician, geologist, natural scientist and engineer. Life Langsdorf was the son of Georg Melchior Langsdorff and Maria Margarethe Koch. His father was saltworks archivist and Hesse-Kassel Rentmeister . He had a twin brother named Daniel Isaak. After finishing Gymnasium in Idstein in 1773, Langsdorf studied, among other things, philosophy, law, and mathematics at University of Göttingen from 1774 until autumn of 1776 with Abraham Gotthelf Kästner and then until 1777 at the University of Giessen. He t...
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Johann Wilhelm Andreas Pfaff
1774 - 1835 (61 years)
Johann Wilhelm Andreas Pfaff , was professor of pure and applied mathematics successively at Dorpat, Nuremberg, Würzburg and Erlangen. He was a brother of Johann Friedrich Pfaff, a mathematician; and of Christian Heinrich Pfaff, a physician and physicist.
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Theodor Molien
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Theodor Georg Andreas Molien was a Russian mathematician of Baltic German origin. He was born in Riga, Latvia, which at that time was a part of Russian Empire. Molien studied associative algebras and polynomial invariantss of finite groups.
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E. W. Hobson
1856 - 1933 (77 years)
Ernest William Hobson FRS was an English mathematician, now remembered mostly for his books, some of which broke new ground in their coverage in English of topics from mathematical analysis. He was Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1910 to 1931.
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Giovanni Ceva
1647 - 1734 (87 years)
Giovanni Ceva was an Italian mathematician widely known for proving Ceva's theorem in elementary geometry. His brother, Tommaso Ceva, was also a well-known poet and mathematician. Life Ceva received his education at a Jesuit college in Milan. Later in his life, he studied at the University of Pisa, where he subsequently became a professor. In 1686, however, he was designated as the Professor of Mathematics at the University of Mantua and worked there for the rest of his life.
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Robert Leslie Ellis
1817 - 1859 (42 years)
Robert Leslie Ellis was an English polymath, remembered principally as a mathematician and editor of the works of Francis Bacon. Biography Ellis was the youngest of six children of Francis Ellis of Bath and his wife Mary. Educated privately, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1836, graduating as Senior Wrangler in 1840 and elected Fellow of Trinity shortly afterwards. Although he had also entered the Inner Temple in 1838, was called to the bar in 1840, and later helped William Whewell with jurisprudence, Ellis never practised law. He hoped unsuccessfully for the Cambridge chair of ci...
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Boris Bukreev
1859 - 1962 (103 years)
Boris Yakovlevich Bukreev was a Russian and Soviet mathematician who worked in the areas of complex functions and differential equations. He studied Fuchsian functionss of rank zero. He was interested in projective and non-Euclidean geometry. He worked on differential invariants and parameters in the theory of surfaces, and also wrote many papers on the history of mathematics.
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Jørgen Pedersen Gram
1850 - 1916 (66 years)
Jørgen Pedersen Gram was a Danish actuary and mathematician who was born in Nustrup, Duchy of Schleswig, Denmark and died in Copenhagen, Denmark. Important papers of his include On series expansions determined by the methods of least squares, and Investigations of the number of primes less than a given number. The mathematical method that bears his name, the Gram–Schmidt process, was first published in the former paper, in 1883.
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Samuil Shatunovsky
1859 - 1929 (70 years)
Samuil Osipovich Shatunovsky was a Russian Empire and Soviet mathematician. He was born in Velyka Znamianka, Ukraine in a poor Jewish family as the 9th child. He completed secondary education in Kherson, Ukraine; then studied for a year in Rostov, Russia and moved to Saint Petersburg seeking university degree. There he studied in several technical universities. Engineering however did not attract Shatunovsky and he dedicated himself to mathematics, voluntarily attending lectures by Chebyshev. Shatunovsky could not complete any university program due to lack of funds. He later attempted to obtain a university degree in Switzerland, but failed for the same reason.
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Alfredo Capelli
1855 - 1910 (55 years)
Alfredo Capelli was an Italian mathematician who discovered Capelli's identity. Biography Capelli earned his Laurea from the University of Rome in 1877 under Giuseppe Battaglini, and moved to the University of Pavia where he worked as an assistant for Felice Casorati. In 1881 he became the professor of Algebraic Analysis at the University of Palermo, replacing Cesare Arzelà who had recently moved to Bologna. In 1886, he moved again to the University of Naples, where he held the chair in algebra. He remained at Naples until his death in 1910. As well as being professor there, Capelli was edito...
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Léon Autonne
1859 - 1916 (57 years)
Léon César Autonne was a French engineer and mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry, differential equations, and linear algebra. Education and career Autonne studied from 1878 to 1880 at l'École polytechnique and then at the École des ponts et chaussées and became there Ingénieur en chef. He received in 1882 from the Sorbonne his Ph.D. with dissertation Recherches sur les intégrales algébriques des équations differentielles à coefficients rationnels, with Charles Hermite as chair of the thesis committee. The dissertation was based on research initiated by Camille Jordan.
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Pierre Gassendi
1592 - 1655 (63 years)
Pierre Gassendi was a French philosopher, Catholic priest, astronomer, and mathematician. While he held a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.
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Johann Euler
1734 - 1800 (66 years)
Johann Albrecht Euler was a Swiss-Russian astronomer and mathematician. Also known as Johann Albert Euler or John-Albert Euler, he was the first child born to the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler , who had emigrated [for the first time] to Saint-Petersburg on 17 May 1727. His mother was Katharina Gsell whose maternal grandmother was the famous scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian and whose father was the Swiss Baroque painter Georg Gsell who had emigrated to Russia in 1716. Katharina married Leonhard Euler on 7 January 1734 and Johann Albert would be the eldest of their 13 c...
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Patrick du Val
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Patrick du Val was a British mathematician, known for his work on algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and general relativity. The concept of Du Val singularity of an algebraic surface is named after him.
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Dmitrii Menshov
1892 - 1988 (96 years)
Dmitrii Yevgenyevich Menshov was a Soviet and Russian mathematician known for his contributions to the theory of trigonometric series. Biography Dmitrii Menshov studied languages as a schoolboy, but from the age of 13 he began to show great interest in mathematics and physics. In 1911, he completed high school with a gold medal. After a semester at the Moscow Engineering School, he enrolled at Moscow State University in 1912 and became a student of Nikolai Luzin.
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Alfred Young
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Alfred Young, FRS was a British mathematician. He was born in Widnes, Lancashire, England, and educated at Monkton Combe School in Somerset and Clare College, Cambridge, graduating BA as 10th Wrangler in 1895. He is known for his work in the area of group theory. Both Young diagrams and Young tableaux are named after him.
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Nicholas Mercator
1620 - 1687 (67 years)
Nicholas Mercator , also known by his German name Kauffmann, was a 17th-century mathematician. He was born in Eutin, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany and educated at Rostock and Leyden after which he lived from 1642 to 1648 in the Netherlands. He lectured at the University of Copenhagen during 1648–1654 and lived in Paris from 1655 to 1657. He was mathematics tutor to Joscelyne Percy, son of the 10th Earl of Northumberland, at Petworth, Sussex . He taught mathematics in London . On 3 May 1661 he observed a transit of Mercury with Christiaan Huygens and Thomas Streete from Long Acre, London. On 14 November 1666 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Narayana Pandita
Nārāyaṇa Paṇḍita was an Indian mathematician. Plofker writes that his texts were the most significant Sanskrit mathematics treatises after those of Bhaskara II, other than the Kerala school. He wrote the Ganita Kaumudi in 1356 about mathematical operations. The work anticipated many developments in combinatorics.
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Joseph Wolstenholme
1829 - 1891 (62 years)
Joseph Wolstenholme was an English mathematician. Wolstenholme was born in Eccles near Salford, Lancashire, England, the son of a Methodist minister, Joseph Wolstenholme, and his wife, Elizabeth, née Clarke. He graduated from St John's College, Cambridge as Third Wrangler in 1850 and was elected a fellow of Christ's College in 1852. Collaborating with Percival Frost, a Treatise on Solid Geometry was published in 1863.
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Grégoire de Saint-Vincent
1584 - 1667 (83 years)
Grégoire de Saint-Vincent - in Latin : Gregorius a Sancto Vincentio, in Dutch : Gregorius van St-Vincent - was a Flemish Jesuit and mathematician. He is remembered for his work on quadrature of the hyperbola.
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Denis Papin
1647 - 1713 (66 years)
Denis Papin FRS was a French physicist, mathematician and inventor, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the pressure cooker and of the steam engine. Early life and education Born in Chitenay , Papin attended a Jesuit school there. In 1661, he attended the University of Angers, from which he graduated with a medical degree in 1669.
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Ibrahim ibn Sinan
908 - 946 (38 years)
Ibrahim ibn Sinan was a mathematician and astronomer who belonged to a family of scholars originally from Harran in northern Mesopotamia. He was the son of Sinan ibn Thabit and the grandson of Thābit ibn Qurra . Like his grandfather, he belonged to a religious sect of star worshippers known as the Sabians of Harran.
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Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai
1901 - 1950 (49 years)
Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai was an Indian mathematician specialising in number theory. His contribution to Waring's problem was described in 1950 by K. S. Chandrasekharan as "almost certainly his best piece of work and one of the very best achievements in Indian Mathematics since Ramanujan".
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Vincenzo Viviani
1622 - 1703 (81 years)
Vincenzo Viviani was an Italian mathematician and scientist. He was a pupil of Torricelli and a disciple of Galileo. Biography Vincenzo Viviani was born in Florence to the nobles Jacopo di Michelangelo Viviani and Maria Alamanno del Nente. While attending a Jesuit school Viviani studied the humanities. Following the study of humanities, Viviani turned to mathematics. He studied geometry under the instruction of Galilean follower Clemente Settimi. It was through Clemente that Viviani would gain recognition and meet Clemente's instructor, Tuscan Court mathematician Famiano Michelini. In 1638,...
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Aleksandr Kurosh
1908 - 1971 (63 years)
Aleksandr Gennadyevich Kurosh was a Soviet mathematician, known for his work in abstract algebra. He is credited with writing The Theory of Groups, the first modern and high-level text on group theory, published in 1944.
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Hugh MacColl
1837 - 1909 (72 years)
Hugh MacColl was a Scottish mathematician, logician and novelist. Life MacColl was the youngest son of a poor Highland family that was at least partly Gaelic-speaking. Hugh's father died when he was still an infant, and Hugh was educated largely thanks to the efforts of his elder brother Malcolm MacColl, an Episcopalian clergyman and friend and political ally of William Ewart Gladstone. Early in his acquaintanceship with Gladstone, Malcolm MacColl persuaded the Liberal politician to provide funds for Hugh's education at Oxford. It was proposed to send him to Oxford University's St. Edmund Hal...
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