The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Mathematics,
#11151
David K. Rubins
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
David Kresz Rubins was an American sculptor and professor. He taught at Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and his various works adorn the Indiana State House, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the National Archives building in Washington, D.C.
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Alfreds Meders
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Alfreds Arnolds Adolfs Meders was a German-Latvian mathematician, and a student of Leopold Kronecker. He was a professor at the Riga Technical University until his mandatory repatriation to Germany in 1939.
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Danilo Blanuša
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Danilo Blanuša was a Croatian Serb mathematician, physicist, engineer and a professor at the University of Zagreb. Biography Blanuša was born in Osijek, Austria-Hungary , into an ethnic Serb family. He attended elementary school in Vienna and Steyr in Austria and gymnasium in Osijek and Zagreb. He studied engineering in both Zagreb and Vienna and also mathematics and physics. His career started in Zagreb, where he started to work and lecture. His student Mileva Prvanović completed her doctorate in 1955, the first in geometry in Serbia. Blanuša was the dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Zagreb in the 1957–58 school year.
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Arthur Preston Mellish
1905 - 1930 (25 years)
Arthur Preston Mellish was a Canadian mathematician, known for his generalization of Barbier's theorem. Arthur Mellish received in 1928 an M.A. in mathematics from the University of British Columbia with thesis An illustrative example of the ellipsoid pendulum. He died at age 24 and had no mathematical publications during his lifetime. After his death, his colleagues at Brown University examined his notes on mathematics. Jacob Tamarkin prepared a paper based upon the notes and published it in the Annals of Mathematics in 1931.
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Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was an Indian mathematician who introduced the four-vertex theorem and Mukhopadhyaya's theorem in plane geometry. Biography Syamadas Mukhopadhyaya was born at Haripal, Hooghly district, in Bengal Presidency, British India. He graduated from Hooghly College, received his M.A. degree from Presidency College in Calcutta, and his Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University in 1910. He also took classes from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science.
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Gaetano Crocco
1877 - 1968 (91 years)
Gaetano Arturo Crocco was an Italian scientist and aeronautics pioneer, the founder of the Italian Rocket Society, and went on to become Italy's leading space scientist. He was born in Naples. In 1927, Crocco began working with solid-propellant rockets and, in 1929, designed and built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in Italy. He began work with monopropellants in 1932, making him one of the first researchers in this field.
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N. G. W. H. Beeger
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Nicolaas George Wijnand Henri Beeger was a Dutch mathematician. His 1916 doctorate was on Dirichlet series. He worked for most of his life as a teacher, working on mathematics papers in his spare evenings. After his retirement as a teacher at 65, he began corresponding with many contemporary mathematicians and dedicated himself to his work. Tilburg University still hold biennial lectures entitled the Beeger lectures in his honour.
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Norman Macleod Ferrers
1829 - 1903 (74 years)
Norman Macleod Ferrers was a British mathematician and university administrator and editor of a mathematical journal. Career and research Ferrers was educated at Eton College before studying at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was Senior Wrangler in 1851. He was appointed to a Fellowship at the college in 1852, was called to the bar in 1855 and was ordained deacon in 1859 and priest in 1860. In 1880, he was appointed Master of the college, and served as vice-chancellor of Cambridge University from 1884 to 1885.
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Bristow Adams
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Bristow Adams was an American journalist, professor, forester, and illustrator. Adams was born in Washington, D.C. He taught at Cornell University from 1914 to 1945. Adams also founded the Stanford Chaparral, the oldest humor magazine in the west, in 1899.
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Gerald Warner Brace
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Gerald Warner Brace was an American novelist, writer, educator, sailor and boat builder. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England. Biography Early life and ancestors He was born on September 24, 1901, in Islip, Long Island, Suffolk County, New York, and died on July 20, 1978, at Blue Hill, Maine.
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Yutaka Taniyama
1927 - 1958 (31 years)
Yutaka Taniyama was a Japanese mathematician known for the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture. Contribution Taniyama was best known for conjecturing, in modern language, automorphic properties of L-functions of elliptic curves over any number field. A partial and refined case of this conjecture for elliptic curves over rationals is called the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture or the modularity theorem whose statement he subsequently refined in collaboration with Goro Shimura. The names Taniyama, Shimura and Weil have all been attached to this conjecture, but the idea is essentially due to Taniyama.
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Charles Napoleon Moore
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Charles Napoleon Moore was an American mathematician at Bowling Green State University who worked on convergence factors. He was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1932 in Zürich. Publications External links
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Friedrich Bachmann
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Friedrich Bachmann was a German mathematician who specialised in geometry and group theory. Life Bachmann was the son of a Lutheran minister Hans Bachmann. Bachmann came from an intellectual family, his paternal grandfather was the number theorist Paul Gustav Heinrich Bachmann. Bachmann took his early education at the Gymnasium in Münster. After attending the Gymnasium, he attended the University of Münster and the Humboldt University of Berlin and graduated in 1927. While there he was a member of the Münster Wingolfs.
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Cristóbal de Losada y Puga
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Cristóbal de Losada y Puga was a Peruvian mathematician and mining engineer. He was Minister of Education of Peru in the government of José Luis Bustamante y Rivero and Director of the National Library of Peru between 1948 and 1961.
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Clara Latimer Bacon
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Dr Clara Latimer Bacon was a mathematician and Professor of Mathematics at Goucher College. She was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. Biography Bacon was the daughter of Larkin Crouch Bacon and Louisa Latimer. She was born in Knox, Illinois, the eldest of her parents four children. She also had four other half siblings. Bacon attended North Abingdon High School and begun her college life at Hedding Collegiate Seminary.
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Gianfranco Cimmino
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Gianfranco Cimmino was an Italian mathematician, working mathematical analysis, numerical analysis, and theory of elliptic partial differential equations: he is known for being the first mathematician generalizing in a weak sense the notion of boundary value in a boundary value problem, and for doing an influential work in numerical analysis.
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Ernest Wedderburn
1884 - 1958 (74 years)
Sir Ernest MacLagan Wedderburn was a Scottish lawyer, and a significant figure both in the civic life of Edinburgh and in the legal establishment. He held the posts of Professor of Conveyancing in the University of Edinburgh , Deputy Keeper of the Signet , and Chairman of the General Council of Solicitors , the forerunner to the Law Society of Scotland, and chaired the latter 1949/50. He was also an enthusiastic amateur scientist, and first Treasurer then Vice President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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Tord Hall
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Tord Hall was a Swedish mathematician, university professor and bestselling author. Life He was born in 1910 in Jönköping, Sweden, and died in 1987. Career He completed his Ph.D. in mathematics from Uppsala University. His PhD advisor was Arne Beurling. The title of his PhD thesis was On Polynomials bounded at an Infinity of Points.
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André Sainte-Laguë
1882 - 1950 (68 years)
André Sainte-Laguë was a French mathematician who was a pioneer in the area of graph theory. His research on seat allocation methods led to one being named after him, the Sainte-Laguë method. Also named after him is the Sainte-Laguë Index for measuring the proportionality of an electoral outcome.
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Ferdinand Rudio
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Ferdinand Rudio was a German and Swiss mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Rudio's father and maternal grandfather were both public officials in the independent Duchy of Nassau, which was annexed by Prussia when Rudio was 10. He was educated at the local gymnasium and Realgymnasium in Wiesbaden, and then in 1874 began studying at ETH Zurich, then known as the Eidgenössische Polytechnikum Zürich. His initial courses in Zurich were in civil engineering, but in his second year he switched to mathematics and physics. Finishing at Zurich in 1877, he went on to graduate studies at the University of Berlin from 1877 to 1880, earning his Ph.D.
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Gheorghe Mihoc
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Gheorghe Mihoc was a Romanian mathematician and statistician. He was born in Brăila, the son of Ecaterina and Gheorghe Mihoc, both originally from the Banat. In 1908, his father moved the family to Bucharest. Here he attended elementary school and the Gheorghe Șincai High School. In 1925 Mihoc enrolled at the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Sciences, and was awarded his degree in mathematics in June 1928.
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Carlos Benjamin de Lyra
1927 - 1974 (47 years)
Carlos Benjamin de Lyra was a prominent Brazilian mathematician, a pioneer in algebraic topology in Brazil and professor at the University of São Paulo. Born in Recife, Pernambuco, he came from a family of sugarcane plantation owners and his dad was the owner of the Diário de Pernambuco, a newspaper that was known nationwide. Lyra was an important mathematician in his area, his course Introdução à Topologia Algébrica was taught in the first Colóquio Brasileiro de Matemática and would become the first text in this field written in Brazilian Portuguese.
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David Enskog
1884 - 1947 (63 years)
David Enskog was a Swedish mathematical physicist. Enskog helped develop the kinetic theory of gases by extending the Maxwell–Boltzmann equations. Biography After undergraduate studies at Uppsala University he received a licentiate degree in physics in 1911, working on gas diffusion under professor Gustaf Granqvist, who was an experimentalist. Enskog did not wish to continue with experimental physics, however, and transferred to professor Carl Wilhelm Oseen for his Ph.D. From 1913, Enskog worked as a high school teacher in mathematics and physics to support himself and his family, while continuing his research and thesis writing in his free time.
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Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov was a Soviet economist and mathematician, known for his development of techniques for the mathematical analysis of economic phenomena. He was awarded the Lenin Prize and served as head of the Laboratory for Economic Assessment Systems at the Leningrad office of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.
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Jessie Marie Jacobs
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Jessie Marie Jacobs Muller Offermann was an American mathematician who also made contributions to the field of genetics. Jessie M. Jacobs completed her undergraduate degree at McPherson College. After a year spent teaching high school she was awarded one of the first two fellowships to study graduate-level mathematics at the University of Kansas, where she earned her master's degree in 1916. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1919 under the supervision of Arthur Byron Coble. She became an associate professor at Rockford College and then,...
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Traian Lalescu
1882 - 1929 (47 years)
Traian Lalescu was a Romanian mathematician. His main focus was on integral equations and he contributed to work in the areas of functional equations, trigonometric series, mathematical physics, geometry, mechanics, algebra, and the history of mathematics.
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May Beenken
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
May Margaret Beenken was an American mathematician. Life Beenken was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Sophie Kirn and Henry Beenken . and she had at least three older siblings. Career Beenken completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in 1928. Her doctoral advisor was Ernest Preston Lane and her thesis was titled Surfaces in Five-Dimensional Space. She later became an instructor at Oshkosh Teacher's College. She also served as a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1945, as well as an associate professor at Immaculate Heart College from 1947 to 19...
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Anatoly Shirshov
1921 - 1981 (60 years)
Anatoly Illarionovich Shirshov was a Soviet mathematician, known for his research on free Lie algebras. He proved the Shirshov–Witt theorem, which states that any Lie subalgebra of a free Lie algebra is itself a free Lie algebra.
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Anna Zofia Krygowska
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Anna Zofia Krygowska was a Polish mathematician, known for her work in mathematics education. Krygowska was born in Lwów, at that time the capital of Austrian Poland, on 19 September 1904. She grew up in Zakopane, and attended the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where she graduated in mathematics in 1927. From 1927 to 1950 she was a primary and secondary school mathematics teacher in Poland, including a time spent underground during World War II. In 1950 she earned a doctorate from the Jagiellonian University, under the supervision of Tadeusz Ważewski, and joined the faculty of the Pedagogical University of Kraków.
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Archytas
428 BC - 347 BC (81 years)
Archytas was an Ancient Greek mathematician, music theorist, statesman, and strategist from the ancient city of Taras in Southern Italy. He was a scientist and philosopher affiliated with the Pythagorean school and famous for being the reputed founder of mathematical mechanics and a friend of Plato.
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Mikhail Ostrogradsky
1801 - 1861 (60 years)
Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky was a Ukrainian-Russian mathematician, mechanician, and physicist of Ukrainian Cossack ancestry. Ostrogradsky was a student of Timofei Osipovsky and is considered to be a disciple of Leonhard Euler, who was known as one of the leading mathematicians of Imperial Russia.
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Sergei Fomin
1917 - 1975 (58 years)
Sergei Vasilyevich Fomin was a Soviet mathematician who was co-author with Andrey Kolmogorov of Introductory real analysis, and co-author with Israel Gelfand of Calculus of Variations , both books that are widely read in Russian and in English.
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Andrzej Mostowski
1913 - 1975 (62 years)
Andrzej Mostowski was a Polish mathematician. He is perhaps best remembered for the Mostowski collapse lemma. Biography Born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary, Mostowski entered University of Warsaw in 1931. He was influenced by Kuratowski, Lindenbaum, and Tarski. His Ph.D. came in 1939, officially directed by Kuratowski but in practice directed by Tarski who was a young lecturer at that time.
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Florian Cajori
1859 - 1930 (71 years)
Florian Cajori was a Swiss-American historian of mathematics. Biography Florian Cajori was born in Zillis, Switzerland, as the son of Georg Cajori and Catherine Camenisch. He attended schools first in Zillis and later in Chur. In 1875, Florian Cajori emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, and attended the State Normal school in Whitewater, Wisconsin. After graduating in 1878, he taught in a country school, and then later began studying mathematics at University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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Andrew Forsyth
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Andrew Russell Forsyth, FRS, FRSE was a British mathematician. Life Forsyth was born in Glasgow on 18 June 1858, the son of John Forsyth, a marine engineer, and his wife Christina Glen. Forsyth studied at Liverpool College and was tutored by Richard Pendlebury before entering Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating senior wrangler in 1881. He was elected a fellow of Trinity and then appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Liverpool at the age of 24. He returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in 1884 and became Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in 1895.
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Grigore Moisil
1906 - 1973 (67 years)
Grigore Constantin Moisil was a Romanian mathematician, computer pioneer, and titular member of the Romanian Academy. His research was mainly in the fields of mathematical logic , algebraic logic, MV-algebra, and differential equations. He is viewed as the father of computer science in Romania.
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Cesare Burali-Forti
1861 - 1931 (70 years)
Cesare Burali-Forti was an Italian mathematician, after whom the Burali-Forti paradox is named. Biography Burali-Forti was born in Arezzo, and was an assistant of Giuseppe Peano in Turin from 1894 to 1896, during which time he discovered a theorem which Bertrand Russell later realised contradicted a previously proved result by Georg Cantor. The contradiction came to be called the Burali-Forti paradox of Cantorian set theory. He died in Turin.
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Alexander von Brill
1842 - 1935 (93 years)
Alexander Wilhelm von Brill was a German mathematician. Born in Darmstadt, Hesse, Brill was educated at the University of Giessen, where he earned his doctorate under supervision of Alfred Clebsch. He held a chair at the University of Tübingen, where Max Planck was among his students. In 1933, he joined the National Socialist Teachers League as one of the first members from Tübingen.
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Boris Galerkin
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Boris Grigoryevich Galerkin was a Soviet mathematician and an engineer. Biography Early life Galerkin was born on in Polotsk, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire, now part of Belarus, to Jewish parents, Girsh-Shleym Galerkin and Perla Basia Galerkina. His parents owned a house in the town, but the home-craft they made did not bring in enough money, so at the age of 12, Boris started working as a calligrapher in the court. He had finished school in Polotsk but still needed the exams from an additional year to grant him the right to continue education at a higher level. He passed those in Minsk in 1893 as an external student.
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Gabriel Cramer
1704 - 1752 (48 years)
Gabriel Cramer was a Genevan mathematician. He was the son of physician Jean Cramer and Anne Mallet Cramer. Biography Cramer showed promise in mathematics from an early age. At 18 he received his doctorate and at 20 he was co-chair of mathematics at the University of Geneva.
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Joseph Bertrand
1822 - 1900 (78 years)
Joseph Louis François Bertrand was a French mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory, differential geometry, probability theory, economics and thermodynamics. Biography Joseph Bertrand was the son of physician Alexandre Jacques François Bertrand and the brother of archaeologist Alexandre Bertrand. His father died when Joseph was only nine years old, but that did not stand in his way of learning and understanding algebraic and elementary geometric concepts, and he also could speak Latin fluently, all when he was of the same age of nine. At eleven years old he attended the course of the École Polytechnique as an auditor .
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Eugen Slutsky
1880 - 1948 (68 years)
Evgeny "Eugen" Evgenievich Slutsky was a Russian and Soviet mathematical statistician, economist and political economist. Work in economics Slutsky is principally known for work in deriving the relationships embodied in the very well known Slutsky equation which is widely used in microeconomic consumer theory for separating the substitution effect and the income effect of a price change on the total quantity of a good demanded following a price change in that good, or in a related good that may have a cross-price effect on the original good quantity. There are many Slutsky analogs in producer...
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Carl Neumann
1832 - 1925 (93 years)
Carl Gottfried Neumann was a German mathematician. Biography Neumann was born in Königsberg, Prussia, as the son of the mineralogist, physicist and mathematician Franz Ernst Neumann , who was professor of mineralogy and physics at Königsberg University. Carl Neumann studied in Königsberg and Halle and was a professor at the universities of Halle, Basel, Tübingen, and Leipzig.
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Gaston Julia
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Gaston Maurice Julia was a French Algerian mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia set. His works were popularized by French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot; the Julia and Mandelbrot fractals are closely related. He founded, independently with Pierre Fatou, the modern theory of holomorphic dynamics.
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Paul Tannery
1843 - 1904 (61 years)
Paul Tannery was a French mathematician and historian of mathematics. He was the older brother of mathematician Jules Tannery, to whose Notions Mathématiques he contributed an historical chapter. Though Tannery's career was in the tobacco industry, he devoted his evenings and his life to the study of mathematicians and mathematical development.
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Mauro Picone
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Mauro Picone was an Italian mathematician. He is known for the Picone identity, the Sturm-Picone comparison theorem and being the founder of the Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo, presently named after him, the first applied mathematics institute ever founded. He was also an outstanding teacher of mathematical analysis: some of the best Italian mathematicians were among his pupils.
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Luca Pacioli
1445 - 1517 (72 years)
Fra. Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli was an Italian mathematician, Franciscan friar, collaborator with Leonardo da Vinci, and an early contributor to the field now known as accounting. He is referred to as the father of accounting and bookkeeping and he was the first person to publish a work on the double-entry system of book-keeping on the continent. He was also called Luca di Borgo after his birthplace, Borgo Sansepolcro, Tuscany.
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Bonaventura Cavalieri
1598 - 1647 (49 years)
Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri was an Italian mathematician and a Jesuate. He is known for his work on the problems of optics and motion, work on indivisibles, the precursors of infinitesimal calculus, and the introduction of logarithms to Italy. Cavalieri's principle in geometry partially anticipated integral calculus.
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Władysław Ślebodziński
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Władysław Ślebodziński was a Polish mathematician. Władysław Ślebodziński was born in Pysznica, Poland and educated at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków where he subsequently held a teaching position until 1921. After 1921, he lectured at the State High School of Mechanical Engineering Poznań and in the thirties, he was a visiting lecturer at the Poznań University and Warsaw University until 1939. During the Second World War, he gave underground lectures, leading to his imprisonment. He survived three German concentration camps: Auschwitz , where he gave underground university-level lectures as prisoner no.
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Johann Friedrich Pfaff
1765 - 1825 (60 years)
Johann Friedrich Pfaff was a German mathematician. He was described as one of Germany's most eminent mathematicians during the 19th century. He was a precursor of the German school of mathematical thinking, under which Carl Friedrich Gauss and his followers largely determined the lines on which mathematics developed during the 19th century.
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