User:Kallolikcalabin

introduction

A mathematician is a person with an extensive knowledge of mathematics who uses this knowledge in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematics is concerned with numbers, data, collection, quantity, structure, space, models and change.

Pythagoras (circa 570-495BC)

Vegetarian mystical leader and number-obsessive, he owes his standing as the most famous name in maths due to a theorem about right-angled triangles, although it now appears it probably predated him. He lived in a community where numbers were venerated as much for their spiritual qualities as for their mathematical ones. His elevation of numbers as the essence of the world made him the towering primogenitor of Greek mathematics, essentially the beginning of mathematics as we know it now. And, famously, he didn't eat beans.

Leonhard Euler (1707- 1783)

The most prolific mathematician of all time, publishing close to 900 books. When he went blind in his late 50s his productivity in many areas increased. His famous formula eiπ + 1 = 0, where e is the mathematical constant sometimes known as Euler's number and i is the square root of minus one, is widely considered the most beautiful in mathematics. He later took an interest in Latin squares – grids where each row and column contains each member of a set of numbers or objects once. Without this work, we might not have had sudoku.

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Known as the prince of mathematicians, Gauss made significant contributions to most fields of 19th century mathematics. An obsessive perfectionist, he didn't publish much of his work, preferring to rework and improve theorems first. His revolutionary discovery of non-Euclidean space (that it is mathematically consistent that parallel lines may diverge) was found in his notes after his death. During his analysis of astronomical data, he realised that measurement error produced a bell curve – and that shape is now known as a Gaussian distribution.

Paul Erdös (1913-1996)

Erdös lived a nomadic, possession-less life, moving from university to university, from colleague's spare room to conference hotel. He rarely published alone, preferring to collaborate – writing about 1,500 papers, with 511 collaborators, making him the second-most prolific mathematician after Euler. As a humorous tribute, an "Erdös number" is given to mathematicians according to their collaborative proximity to him: No 1 for those who have authored papers with him; No 2 for those who have authored with mathematicians with an Erdös No 1, and so on.

Hypatia (cAD360-415)

Women are under-represented in mathematics, yet the history of the subject is not exclusively male. Hypatia was a scholar at the library in Alexandria in the 4th century CE. Her most valuable scientific legacy was her edited version of Euclid's The Elements, the most important Greek mathematical text, and one of the standard versions for centuries after her particularly horrific death: she was murdered by a Christian mob who stripped her naked, peeled away her flesh with broken pottery and ripped apart her limbs.