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,
#10351
Hugo Hadwiger
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Hugo Hadwiger was a Swiss mathematician, known for his work in geometry, combinatorics, and cryptography. Biography Although born in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hadwiger grew up in Bern, Switzerland. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bern, where he majored in mathematics but also studied physics and actuarial science. He continued at Bern for his graduate studies, and received his Ph.D. in 1936 under the supervision of Willy Scherrer. He was for more than forty years a professor of mathematics at Bern.
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Carlo Emilio Bonferroni
1892 - 1960 (68 years)
Carlo Emilio Bonferroni was an Italian mathematician who worked on probability theory. Biography Bonferroni studied piano and conducting in Turin Conservatory and at University of Turin under Giuseppe Peano and Corrado Segre, where he obtained his laurea. During this time he also studied at University of Vienna and ETH Zurich. During World War I, he was an officer among the engineers. Bonferroni held a position as assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Turin, and in 1923 took up the chair of financial mathematics at the Economics Institute of the University of Bari. In 1933 he t...
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Theaetetus
416 BC - 369 BC (47 years)
Theaetetus of Athens , possibly the son of Euphronius of the Athenian deme Sunium, was a Greek mathematician. His principal contributions were on irrational lengths, which was included in Book X of Euclid's Elements and proving that there are precisely five regular convex polyhedra. A friend of Socrates and Plato, he is the central character in Plato's eponymous Socratic dialogue.
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Georg Scheffers
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Georg Scheffers was a German mathematician specializing in differential geometry. Life Scheffers was born on 21 November 1866 in the village of Altendorf near Holzminden . Scheffers began his university career at the University of Leipzig where he studied with Felix Klein and Sophus Lie. Scheffers was a coauthor with Lie for three of the earliest expressions of Lie theory:Lectures on Differential equations with known Infinitesimal transformations ,Lectures on Continuous groups , andGeometry of Contact Transformations .All three are now available online through archive.org.
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Marcel J. E. Golay
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Marcel Jules Edouard Golay was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, and information theorist, who applied mathematics to real-world military and industrial problems. He was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
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Michel Rolle
1652 - 1719 (67 years)
Michel Rolle was a French mathematician. He is best known for Rolle's theorem . He is also the co-inventor in Europe of Gaussian elimination . Life Rolle was born in Ambert, Basse-Auvergne. Rolle, the son of a shopkeeper, received only an elementary education. He married early and as a young man struggled to support his family on the meager wages of a transcriber for notaries and attorney. In spite of his financial problems and minimal education, Rolle studied algebra and Diophantine analysis on his own. He moved from Ambert to Paris in 1675.
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Karl Rohn
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Rohn was a German mathematician, who studied geometry. Life and work Rohn studied in Darmstadt, Leipzig and Munich, initially engineering but then mathematics by the influence of Alexander von Brill, among the others. In 1878 he received a doctorate under the supervision of Felix Klein in Munich, and in 1879 he habilitated at Leipzig. The subject of his doctoral thesis and habilitation was the Kummer surfaces of order 4 and their relationship with hyperelliptic functions . In 1884 he became an associate professor at the University of Leipzig and a year later at the Dresden University of Technology, where in 1887 he was a professor of descriptive geometry.
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Roger Joseph Boscovich
1711 - 1787 (76 years)
Roger Joseph Boscovich was a physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, diplomat, poet, theologian, Jesuit priest, and a polymath from the Republic of Ragusa. He studied and lived in Italy and France where he also published many of his works.
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Aleksey Krylov
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov was a Russian naval engineer, applied mathematician and memoirist. Biography Aleksey Nikolayevich Krylov was born on August 3 O.S., 1863 in Visyaga village near the town of Alatyr, Simbirsk Governorate, Russian Empire to the family of a retired artillery officer. His father, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Krylov , was the local landlord and vice-Marshal of Nobility, but had relatively liberal views and later led the zemskaya uprava in Alatyr. His mother, née Sofya Viktorovna Lyapunova, was a member of the distinguished Lyapunov family .
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Otakar Borůvka
1899 - 1995 (96 years)
Otakar Borůvka was a Czech mathematician best known today for his work in graph theory. Education and career Borůvka was born in Uherský Ostroh, a town in Moravia , the son of a school headmaster. He attended the grammar school in Uherské Hradiště beginning in 1910. In 1916, influenced by the ongoing World War I, he moved to the military school in Hranice, and later he enrolled into the Imperial and Royal Technical Military Academy in Mödling near Vienna.
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George William Hill
1838 - 1914 (76 years)
George William Hill was an American astronomer and mathematician. Working independently and largely in isolation from the wider scientific community, he made major contributions to celestial mechanics and to the theory of ordinary differential equations. The importance of his work was explicitly acknowledged by Henri Poincaré in 1905. In 1909 Hill was awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal, "on the ground of his researches in mathematical astronomy". Today, he is chiefly remembered for the Hill differential equation.
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Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich
1875 - 1929 (54 years)
Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich was an English mathematician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Life Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich was born on 8 February 1875, in Wolverhampton, England. He was descended from Bryan I'Anson, of Ashby St Ledgers, Sheriff of London and father of the 17th century 1st Baronet Sir Bryan I'Anson of Bassetsbury.
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Thomas Harriot
1560 - 1621 (61 years)
Thomas Harriot , also spelled Harriott, Hariot or Heriot, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator to whom the theory of refraction is attributed. Thomas Harriot was also recognized for his contributions in navigational techniques, working closely with John White to create advanced maps for navigation. While Harriot worked extensively on numerous papers on the subjects of astronomy, mathematics and navigation, he remains obscure because he published little of it, namely only The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia . This book includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time.
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Pierre Louis Maupertuis
1698 - 1759 (61 years)
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.
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Arthur Moritz Schoenflies
1853 - 1928 (75 years)
Arthur Moritz Schoenflies , sometimes written as Schönflies, was a German mathematician, known for his contributions to the application of group theory to crystallography, and for work in topology. Schoenflies was born in Landsberg an der Warthe . Arthur Schoenflies married Emma Levin in 1896. He studied under Ernst Kummer and Karl Weierstrass, and was influenced by Felix Klein.
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Jan Mikusiński
1913 - 1987 (74 years)
Jan Mikusiński was a Polish mathematician based at the University of Wrocław known for his pioneering work in mathematical analysis. Mikusiński developed an operational calculus – known as the Calculus of Mikusiński , which is relevant for solving differential equations. His operational calculus is based upon an algebra of the convolution of functions with respect to the Fourier transform. From the convolution product he goes on to define what in other contexts is called the field of fractions or a quotient field. These ordered pairs of functions Mikusiński calls "operators", the "Mikusiński ...
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Evangelista Torricelli
1608 - 1647 (39 years)
Evangelista Torricelli was an Italian physicist and mathematician, and a student of Galileo. He is best known for his invention of the barometer, but is also known for his advances in optics and work on the method of indivisibles. The torr is named after him.
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Paul du Bois-Reymond
1831 - 1889 (58 years)
Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond was a German mathematician who was born in Berlin and died in Freiburg. He was the brother of Emil du Bois-Reymond. His thesis was concerned with the mechanical equilibrium of fluids. He worked on the theory of functions and in mathematical physics. His interests included Sturm–Liouville theory, integral equations, variational calculus, and Fourier series. In this latter field, he was able in 1873 to construct a continuous function whose Fourier series is not convergent. His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost eve...
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Theodor Schneider
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Theodor Schneider was a German mathematician, best known for providing proof of what is now known as the Gelfond–Schneider theorem. Schneider studied from 1929 to 1934 in Frankfurt; he solved Hilbert's 7th problem in his PhD thesis, which then came to be known as the Gelfond–Schneider theorem. Later he became an assistant to Carl Ludwig Siegel in Göttingen, where he stayed until 1953. Then he became a professor in Erlangen and finally until his retirement in Freiburg . During his time in Freiburg he also served as the director of the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach from 1959 to 1963.
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Andrey Kiselyov
1852 - 1940 (88 years)
Andrey Petrovich Kiselyov was a Russian and Soviet mathematician. Biography Kiselyov attended the district school in Mtsensk and later enrolled at the Gymnasium in Oryol, the main city in the region. He graduated from the Gymnasium in 1871 with the gold medal and, in the same year, entered the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of St Petersburg University. In 1875, Kiselyov graduated from the university with a degree that allowed him to teach in a Gymnasium. He taught mathematics, mechanics, and drawing. It was at that time when he started writing his own textbooks.
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Jean Delsarte
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Jean Frédéric Auguste Delsarte was a French mathematician known for his work in mathematical analysis, in particular, for introducing mean-periodic functions and generalised shift operators. He was one of the founders of the Bourbaki group. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1932 at Zürich.
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Nilakantha Somayaji
1444 - 1544 (100 years)
Keļallur Nilakantha Somayaji , also referred to as Keļallur Comatiri, was a major mathematician and astronomer of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of his most influential works was the comprehensive astronomical treatise Tantrasamgraha completed in 1501. He had also composed an elaborate commentary on Aryabhatiya called the Aryabhatiya Bhasya. In this Bhasya, Nilakantha had discussed infinite series expansions of trigonometric functions and problems of algebra and spherical geometry. Grahapariksakrama is a manual on making observations in astronomy based on instruments of the time.
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V. Ramaswamy Aiyer
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
V. Ramaswamy Aiyer was a civil servant in the Madras Provincial Service. In 1907, along with a group of friends, he founded the Indian Mathematical Society with headquarters in Pune. He was the first Secretary of the Society and acted in that position until 1910. Ramaswamy Aiyer also served the Society as its President from 1926 to 1930.
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Renato Caccioppoli
1904 - 1959 (55 years)
Renato Caccioppoli was an Italian mathematician, known for his contributions to mathematical analysis, including the theory of functions of several complex variables, functional analysis, measure theory.
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Thomas Simpson
1710 - 1761 (51 years)
Thomas Simpson FRS was a British mathematician and inventor known for the eponymous Simpson's rule to approximate definite integrals. The attribution, as often in mathematics, can be debated: this rule had been found 100 years earlier by Johannes Kepler, and in German it is called Keplersche Fassregel.
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Horace Lamb
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Sir Horace Lamb was a British applied mathematician and author of several influential texts on classical physics, among them Hydrodynamics and Dynamical Theory of Sound . Both of these books remain in print. The word vorticity was invented by Lamb in 1916.
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Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann
1837 - 1920 (83 years)
Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann was a German mathematician. Life Bachmann studied mathematics at the university of his native city of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1862 for his thesis on group theory. He then went to Breslau to study for his habilitation, which he received in 1864 for his thesis on Complex Units.
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Christian Doppler
1803 - 1853 (50 years)
Christian Andreas Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He formulated the principle – now known as the Doppler effect – that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.
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Sofya Kovalevskaya
1850 - 1891 (41 years)
Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya , born Korvin-Krukovskaya , was a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was a pioneer for women in mathematics around the world – the first woman to obtain a doctorate in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor. According to historian of science Ann Hibner Koblitz, Kovalevskaya was "the greatest known woman scientist before the twentieth century".
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Christian Kramp
1760 - 1826 (66 years)
Christian Kramp was a French mathematician, who worked primarily with factorials. Christian Kramp's father was his teacher at grammar school in Strasbourg. Kramp studied medicine and graduated; however, his interests certainly ranged outside medicine, for in addition to a number of medical publications he published a work on crystallography in 1793. In 1795, France annexed the Rhineland area in which Kramp was carrying out his work and after this he became a teacher at Cologne , teaching mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Kramp could read and write in German and French.
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Edouard Zeckendorf
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Edouard Zeckendorf was a Belgian doctor, army officer and amateur mathematician. In mathematics, he is best known for his work on Fibonacci numbers and in particular for proving Zeckendorf's theorem, though he published over 20 papers, mostly in number theory.
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William George Horner
1786 - 1837 (51 years)
William George Horner was a British mathematician. Proficient in classics and mathematics, he was a schoolmaster, headmaster and schoolkeeper who wrote extensively on functional equations, number theory and approximation theory, but also on optics. His contribution to approximation theory is honoured in the designation Horner's method, in particular respect of a paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1819. The modern invention of the zoetrope, under the name Daedaleum in 1834, has been attributed to him.
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Enno Dirksen
1792 - 1850 (58 years)
Enno Dirksen was a German mathematician at the University of Berlin. Early life Enno Dirksen was born on 3 January 1788 in Eilsum, Prussia to Dirk Heeren Dirksen and Elisabeth Berends. Between 1803 and 1807, he obtained private lessons in mathematics, physics, astronomy and navigation from a teacher at the Emden Navigation School. Following this, he taught at local schools in Hatzum and in Hinte.
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Nina Bari
1901 - 1961 (60 years)
Nina Karlovna Bari was a Soviet mathematician known for her work on trigonometric series. She is also well-known for two textbooks, Higher Algebra and The Theory of Series. Early life and education Nina Bari was born in Russia on 19 November 1901, the daughter of Olga and Karl Adolfovich Bari, a physician. In 1918, she became one of the first women to be accepted to the Department of Physics and Mathematics at the prestigious Moscow State University. She graduated in 1921—just three years after entering the university. After graduation, Bari began her teaching career. She lectured at the Moscow Forestry Institute, the Moscow Polytechnic Institute, and the Sverdlov Communist Institute.
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Cecilia Krieger
1894 - 1974 (80 years)
Cypra Cecilia Krieger-Dunaij was an Austro-Hungarian -born mathematician of Jewish ancestry who lived and worked in Canada. Krieger was the third person to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from a university in Canada, in 1930, as well as the third woman to have been awarded a doctorate in any discipline in Canada. Krieger is well known for having translated two works of Wacław Sierpiński in general topology. The Krieger–Nelson Prize, awarded annually by the Canadian Mathematical Society since 1995 for outstanding research by a female mathematician, is named in honour of Krieger and Evelyn Nelson.
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Mikhail Kravchuk
1892 - 1942 (50 years)
Mykhailo Pylypovych Kravchuk, also Krawtchouk , was a Soviet Ukrainian mathematician and the author of around 180 articles on mathematics. He primarily wrote papers on differential equations and integral equations, studying both their theory and applications. His two-volume monograph on the solution of linear differential and integral equations by the method of moments was translated 1938–1942 by John Vincent Atanasoff who found this work useful in his computer-project . His student Klavdiya Latysheva was the first Ukrainian woman to obtain a doctorate in the mathematical and physical scienc...
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Michel Loève
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Michel Loève was a French-American probabilist and mathematical statistician, of Jewish origin. He is known in mathematical statistics and probability theory for the Karhunen–Loève theorem and Karhunen–Loève transform.
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Lars Edvard Phragmén
1863 - 1937 (74 years)
Lars Edvard Phragmén was a Swedish mathematician. The son of a college professor, he studied at Uppsala then Stockholm, graduating from Uppsala in 1889. He became professor at Stockholm in 1892, after Sofia Kovalevskaia.
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James Jeans
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Sir James Hopwood Jeans was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician. Early life Born in Ormskirk, Lancashire, the son of William Tulloch Jeans, a parliamentary correspondent and author. Jeans was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Wilson's Grammar School, Camberwell and Trinity College, Cambridge. As a gifted student, Jeans was counselled to take an aggressive approach to the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos competition:
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Mathias Lerch
1860 - 1922 (62 years)
Mathias Lerch or Matyáš Lerch was a Czech mathematician who published about 250 papers, largely on mathematical analysis and number theory. He studied in Prague and Berlin; subsequently held teaching positions at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the Brno University of Technology in Brno, and finally at then newly founded Masaryk University in Brno where he became its first mathematics professor.
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Marquis de Condorcet
1743 - 1794 (51 years)
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet , known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a liberal economy, free and equal public instruction, constitutional government, and equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale — and the Jacobin faction in particular — voted to have Condorcet arrested.
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James Gregory
1638 - 1675 (37 years)
James Gregory FRS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. His surname is sometimes spelt as Gregorie, the original Scottish spelling. He described an early practical design for the reflecting telescope – the Gregorian telescope – and made advances in trigonometry, discovering infinite series representations for several trigonometric functions.
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Karl Weissenberg
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Karl Weissenberg was an Austrian physicist, notable for his contributions to rheology and crystallography. Biography The Weissenberg effect was named after him, as was the Weissenberg number. He invented a Goniometer to study X-ray diffraction of crystals for which he received the Duddell Medal of the Institute of Physics in 1946, The European Society of Rheology offers a Weissenberg award in his honour. and the Weissenberg rheogoniometer, a type of rheometer.
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Nikolai Bugaev
1837 - 1903 (66 years)
Nikolai Vasilievich Bugaev was a prominent Russian mathematician, the father of Andrei Bely. Early life and education Bugaev was born in Georgia, Russian Empire into a somewhat unstable family , and at the age of ten young Nikolai was sent to Moscow to find his own means of obtaining an education. He graduated in 1859 from Moscow University, where he majored in mathematics and physics.
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William Burnside
1852 - 1927 (75 years)
This English mathematician is sometimes confused with the Irish mathematician William S. Burnside . William Burnside was an English mathematician. He is known mostly as an early researcher in the theory of finite groups.
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Robert Recorde
1512 - 1558 (46 years)
Robert Recorde was a Welsh physician and mathematician. He invented the equals sign and also introduced the pre-existing plus and minus signs to English speakers in 1557. Biography Born around 1510, Robert Recorde was the second and last son of Thomas and Rose Recorde of Tenby, Pembrokeshire, in Wales.
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Oscar Chisini
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Oscar Chisini was an Italian mathematician. He introduced the Chisini mean in 1929. Biography Chisini was born in Bergamo. In 1929, he founded the Institute of Mathematics at the University of Milan, along with Gian Antonio Maggi and Giulio Vivanti. He then held the position of chairman of the Institute from the early 1930s until 1959.
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Trygve Nagell
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
Trygve Nagell or Trygve Nagel was a Norwegian mathematician, known for his works on Diophantine equations in number theory. Education and career He was born Nagel and adopted the spelling Nagell later in life. He received his doctorate at the University of Oslo in 1926, where his advisor was Axel Thue. He continued to lecture at the University until 1931. He was a professor at the University of Uppsala from 1931 to 1962. His doctoral students include Harald Bergström.
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Ion Barbu
1895 - 1961 (66 years)
Ion Barbu was a Romanian mathematician and poet. His name is associated with the Mathematics Subject Classification number 51C05, which is a major posthumous recognition reserved only to pioneers of investigations in an area of mathematical inquiry.
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Gyula Kőnig
1849 - 1913 (64 years)
Gyula Kőnig was a mathematician from Hungary. His mathematical publications in German appeared under the name Julius König. His son Dénes Kőnig was a graph theorist. Biography Gyula Kőnig was active literarily and mathematically. He studied medicine in Vienna and, from 1868 on, in Heidelberg. After having worked, instructed by Hermann von Helmholtz, on electrical stimulation of nerves, he switched to mathematics.
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