MATHINFINITY

WESTERN MATHEMATICIANS

Thales (624 - 547 B.C.), ancient Greek. He proposed rational thinking. He had proved a number of theories in geometry.

Pythagoras (580 - 500 B.C.), ancient Greek. He created Pythagoreanism, which was a school combining politics, religion and mathematics. Pythagoreans believed that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things. All kinds of relations in the universe can be expressed by integers or their ratios. He is best known for the Pythagoras' Theorem.

Plato (427 - 347 B.C.) He was born in Athens and best known for the Republic. Although he did not have a lot of achievements in mathematical study, he had established the Platonic Academy that taught philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and other natural science knowledge. He was the maker of mathematicians.

Aristotle (384 - 322 B.C.) He was the pupil of Plato but he shifted from the Idealism of Plato and became the founder of Formal Logic. He differentiated philosophy from other subjects, and created independent studies on logic, ethics, politics, biology and so on.

Euclid (325 - 265 B.C.), ancient Greek. The Elements that he completed around 300 B.C. is still being used as textbooks nowadays. It has put forward the proof of the Pythagoras's Theorem. It included plane and solid geometry, and content about algebra and the number theory such as integer, fraction, proportion, etc. It has proved that prime numbers are infinite. It says that "light" travels in straight lines. Hence, optics has become a part of geometry.

Archimedes (287 - 212 B.C.) He was born in Sicily of Italy. Besides the famous Archimedes' Principle, he used the methods of exhaustion to prove the relationship between the areas of circle and triangle. He calculated the value of Pi (π) to be 3.140845< π <3.142857. By combining with mechanics, he proved parabola, defined spiral and worked out the calculation method of a spiral's area, geometric methods to find the sum of geometric and arithmetic progressions, etc.

Diophantus of Alexandria (246 - 330), ancient Greek. He was the first mathematician to use symbol to represent power. His work Arithmetica is comparable to the Elements. Arithmetica included a collection of 290 problems, including the Diophantine equations and algebraic concepts like unknown numbers.

Leonardo Fibonacci (1175 - 1250), Italian. He was the first European who studied Hindu-Arabic mathematicas. In his Liber Abaci, he proposed the famous rabbit problem and introduced the Fibonnacci Number.

François Viète (1540 - 1603), French. His most important contributions include systematically introducing algebraic symbols into Europe and promoting the development of equations.

John Napier (1550 - 1617), Scottish. He was the founder of Logarithm.

Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642), Italian. He used the language of mathematics to express physical laws. He was also the first person to use coordinates to express physics in order to study the Kinematics

Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630), German. He discovered the laws of planetary motion, and began to use mathematical formulas to represent laws.

René Descartes (1596 - 1650), French. He invented the Coordinates. He used algebraic equations to describe geometric figures, hence inventing Analytic Geometry.

Pierre de Fermat (1601 - 1665), French. His achievements in the number theory include Fermat's Last Theorem, Fermat's Little Theorem, Fermat's Theorem on the sum of two squares, Fermat number and Fermat's spiral.

Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), French. He discovered the Pascal's Theorem and he was the founder of Probability. He invented the world's first calculator, the Pascaline, that could perform additions and subtractions.

Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695), Dutch. He was also the founder of probability. He studied the mathematical characteristics of the pendulum motion, put forward the wave theory of light and used geometry to explain the principles of the reflection and refraction of light.

Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727), British. In his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, he explained universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which laid the foundation of mechanics and astronomy. He was also one of the inventors of Calculus.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716), German. He was also an inventor of calculus. He also invented the Binary Number System and used it to understand the Fuxi hexagrams.

Abraham de Moivre (1667 - 1754), French. He created De Moivre's Formula that connected complex numbers and trigonometry. His other contributions lied in the areas of normal distribution and probability theory as well as application of probability in the insurance industry.

Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783), Swiss. He is best known for the Euler's Number and Euler's Identity. He had important discoveries in Calculus and the Graph Theory. He introduced and promoted a lot of mathematical symbols, for example, function "f(x)".

Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717 - 1783). French. He was one of the key pioneers of mathematical analysis. He had done a lot of studies in mechanics and put forward the D'Alembert Principle of fluid mechanics.

Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736 - 1813). He was born in Italy and founder of Lagrangian mechanics.

Pierre-Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749 - 1827), French. He discovered the Laplace Transform and Laplace's Equation.

Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830), French. He established a set of mathematical theories when studying thermal conduction. Later he proposed the Fourier Series and Fourier Transform when revising his papers.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855), German. His achievements include the ruler-and-compass construction of the heptadecagon, least squares and estimation of the orbit of Ceres. He also focused on the calculation of surface areas and discovered the Gaussian Distribution, a bell-shaped normal distribution curve.

Siméon Denis Poisson (1781 - 1840), French. He had contributions in the integration theory, differential equations, progression theory, etc.

Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789 - 1857), French. His research areas included differential equation, infinitesimal calculus, etc.. Throughout his life, he had discovered and proved numerous differential equations.

Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792 - 1856), Russian. He alone had developed Non-Euclidean Geometry.

Niels Henrik Abel (1802 - 1829), Norwegian. He had important contributions in the theory of equations, infinite series and elliptic function.

William Rowan Hamilton (1805 - 1865), Irish. His famous contribution to mathematical physics is the reformulation of Newtonian Mechanics, now called Hamiltonian Mechanics. He is also best known for discovering Quaternion.

Evariste Galois (1811 - 1832), French. The Galois Theory and Group Theory that he studied had become important branches of Abstract Algebra.

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1826 - 1866), German. He was the founder of Riemannian Geometry.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879), Scottish. He expressed Faraday's points of view about physics using mathematics. He used the famous Maxwell's Equations to confirm the relations among electric charge, electric current, electric field and magnetic field.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955). He was a German-born Jewish. His major contributions included Photoelectric Effect, Brownian Motion, Special Relativity, General Relativity, Mass-energy Equivalence, etc.

George Boole (1815 - 1864), British. He was the inventor of Boolean Algebra.

Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor (1845 - 1918), German born in Russia. He established the modern Set Theory.

Jules-Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912), French. He had a lot of contributions for the basics of mathematics, mathematical physics and celestial mechanics. He proposed the Poincaré Conjecture, established the foundation for the modern Chaos Theory. He was even earlier than Albert Einstein to draft the simple version of special relativity.

David Hilbert (1862 - 1943), German. He was much respected for inventing the Invariant Theory, Hilbert's Axioms and Hilbert Space.

Hermann Minkowski (1864 - 1909). He was a Russian-born Jewish German. He was the creator of 4-dimensional Space and also assisted Hertz in researching on the electromagnetic wave theory.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872 - 1970), British. He proposed the Russell's Paradox.

Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877 - 1947), British. He had important contributions in mathematical analysis and analytic number theory. He was one of the discoverers of the Hardy-Weinberg Principle in Population Genetics.

Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl (1885 - 1955), German. His published works covered time, space, matter, philosophy, logic, symmetric relation and history of mathematics. He was one of the earliest to combine General Relativity and Electromagnetism.

John Edensor Littlewood (1885 - 1977), British. The Littlewood's Law that he proposed states that a person can expect to experience an event with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month.

Norbert Wiener (1894 - 1964), American. He was the founder of Cybernetics.

John von Neumann (1903 - 1957). He was a Hungarian-born Jewish American. He wrote the book Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour and created the Game Theory together with Oskar Morgensten. He had many contributions in mathematics, quantum mechanics and computer science.

Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1906 - 1978). He was born in Brno of Austria-Hungary. He was a member of the Vienna Circle. His most outstanding achievement was the Godel's Incompleteness Theorems.

Hassler Whitney (1907 - 1989), American. He was one of the founders of Singularity, laid foundation works in manifolds, characteristics classes, geometric integration theory, etc.

Alan Mathison Turing (1912 - 1954), British. During the second world war, Turing led a team to break the German cipher, Enigma. He had many contributions in mathematics, logic, computer science, artificial intelligence, etc.

Paul Erdos (1913 - 1996), Hungarian. Erdős's prolific output of writing mathematical papers with co-authors prompted the creation of the Erdős's number, the shortest path between a mathematician and Erdős in terms of co-authorships. When the Erdős's number is 0, his collaborator has an Erdős number of 1. When the Erdős's number is 1, his collaborator has an Erdős number of 2, and so on.

Claude Elwood Shannon (1916 - 2001), American. He created the Information Theory, which was a branch of applied mathematics, electrical engineering and computer science. It involves the qualification, storage and communication of information. It has been applied in many different areas today.

Michael Atiyah (1929 - ), British. His main research area was geometry. He participated in creating the Topological K-theory. Together with Isaac Bashevis Singer, he had proved the well-known Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem.

Benoit Mandelbrot (1924 - 2010), born in Poland. He created the term "Fractal". He believed that Fractal Geometry is not only natural, but it was even more intuitive and natural than Euclid's research objects that had a smooth surface.

Jean-Pierre Serre (1926 - ), French. His major contributions included Topology, Algebraic Geometry, Number Theory, etc. He proposed the famous Serre Conjecture.

John Forbes Nash Jr. (1928 - 2015), American. He mainly studied the Game Theory, partial differential geometry and Partial Differential Equation. The Nash Equilibrium that he proposed was widely used in economics, computer science, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, etc.

Andrew John Wiles (1953 - ), British. He had proved the Fermat's Last Theorem.

Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman (1966 - ), Russian. He had proved the Poincaré Conjecture, one of the Millennium Prize Problems.

Did you know?

1) The Fields Medals, Nevanlinna Prize, Wolf Prize in Mathematics and Abel Prize are awarded to mathematicians for recognizing their great achievements. The full name of the Fields Medals is "The International Medals for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics". It is awarded to outstanding mathematicians under the age of 40 year for their contributions. The Nevanlinna Prize is awarded to scholars that have major contributions in the mathematical theories regarding information technology. The Wolf Prize in Mathematics of Israel is awarded to contributors of Human Science and Arts and Civilization. The Abel Prize of Norway is awarded to researchers that have great accomplishments in the field of mathematics. In addition, the International Mathematical Union has started to present the Chern Medal Award since 2010. This is an award for those who have life achievement in mathematics.

2) The Hua Mathematics Award, Chern Prize in Mathematics and The Zhong Jiaqing Mathematics Awards are prizes especially presented to Chinese mathematicians. The Hua Mathematics Award is presented to senior mathematicians over 50 years old. The Chern Prize in Mathematics is awarded to young and middle-aged mathematicians with outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics. The Zhong Jiaqing Mathematics Awards are awarded to the most outstanding master's and doctoral students in the field of mathematics. Furthermore, the Chenxing Prize in Mathematics is awarded to Chinese mathematicians under the age of 45 who has outstanding achievements in theoretical and applied mathematics. The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Science is awarded to scholars who have made outstanding contributions in academic and scientific research or applications