49 Fun Facts About Famous Mathematicians

Which ancient Greek mathematician wrote the Elements?

Euclid: very little is known about his life, yet his Elements shaped geometry until the early 19th century.

Archimedes asked for which two shapes to be placed on his tomb?

A sphere and a cylinder: Cicero later found what he took to be his neglected tomb, overgrown with brambles, and had it cleared.

In which Sicilian city did Archimedes live and die during a Roman siege?

Syracuse: his war machines are said to have held up the besieging Romans for a long time before a soldier killed him when the city fell.

Pythagoras founded his secretive school in which southern Italian town?

Croton: after the city crushed its neighbour Sybaris around 510 BC, his followers were drawn into its political feuds.

Thales of Miletus believed all of nature was based on which single substance?

Water: he pictured the Earth floating on it and is said to have explained earthquakes as the water rocking it.

Which city was home to Hypatia, the ancient mathematician and philosopher?

Alexandria: caught up in a feud between the city's prefect and its bishop, she was murdered by Christians in 415.

Which number did the 7th-century Indian mathematician Brahmagupta first give rules for calculating with?

Zero: his rules for it included that zero divided by zero is zero, a result modern mathematics does not accept.

The word algebra comes from the title of a treatise by which Baghdad scholar?

Al-Khwarizmi: his own name, Latinised as Algoritmi, also gave English the word 'algorithm'.

Which Persian mathematician solved cubic equations geometrically by intersecting conic sections?

Omar Khayyam: he also led the observatory team that revised the Persian calendar for Sultan Malik-Shah.

Fibonacci's book that popularised Indo-Arabic numerals in Europe was called what?

Liber Abaci: its puzzle about breeding rabbits is why the famous number sequence carries his name.

Pierre de Fermat wrote his famous 'Last Theorem' in the margin of a book by which ancient Greek?

Diophantus: Fermat noted that he had a truly remarkable proof, which the margin of the Arithmetica was too small to contain.

Who finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem?

Andrew Wiles: he first read about the problem at ten, in a book from his local library, and came back to it as a professor.

The SI unit of which quantity is named after Blaise Pascal?

Pressure: in 1648 he showed that air pressure falls with height, using barometer readings taken on the Puy de Dôme.

Which invention did Blaise Pascal begin building in 1642, aged 18?

A calculator: he built it to ease his father's tax work, but its cost and complexity meant few machines were ever sold.

Which philosopher-mathematician united geometry and algebra into analytic geometry?

René Descartes: he agreed to tutor Queen Christina of Sweden at 5 a.m. in Stockholm and died that winter.

Isaac Newton shares credit for calculus with which German polymath?

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Newton developed calculus first, but it is Leibniz's notation that became the standard.

Leibniz is credited with devising which number system that underlies modern computing?

Thomas Harriot had quietly devised the same system decades earlier.

Which Swiss mathematician founded graph theory and topology and introduced the notion of a function?

Leonhard Euler: he became almost totally blind, yet kept up his enormous output with help from his sons and scribes.

Bernoulli's principle, explaining the aeroplane wing, is named for which member of the Basel family?

Daniel: when he and his father Johann shared the Paris Academy's 1734 prize, Johann was furious and banned him from his house.

At 19, Gauss proved the constructibility of which polygon, the first such advance in 2,000 years?

Heptadecagon: it can be built because 17 is a Fermat prime.

Gauss helped identify which dwarf planet by predicting its orbit?

Ceres: Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801 but lost it behind the Sun, and Gauss's predicted orbit let astronomers find it again.

Which Italian-born mathematician wrote the Mécanique analytique?

Joseph-Louis Lagrange: in Revolutionary France he sat on the Academy's committee on weights and measures that worked on the metric system.

Which mathematician, called the French Newton, examined Napoleon at the École Militaire in 1785?

Pierre-Simon Laplace: Napoleon later made him interior minister, then replaced him after only six weeks.

Under what male pseudonym did Sophie Germain correspond with Carl Friedrich Gauss?

Monsieur Le Blanc: she borrowed the name of a real former student, fearing the ridicule a woman in science would face.

Which French teenager founded group theory and died in a duel at 20?

Évariste Galois: an ardent republican, he was jailed for illegally wearing an artillery uniform and fought the fatal duel soon after his release.

Which Norwegian proved the general quintic cannot be solved in radicals, then died at 26?

Niels Henrik Abel: to save on printing costs he squeezed his first proof into six pages.

Which French mathematician rigorously proved calculus's key theorems, pioneering real analysis?

Augustin-Louis Cauchy: after the 1830 revolution he did not swear allegiance to the new regime and lost his posts in Paris.

Whose 1859 paper on counting primes posed a Millennium Prize Problem?

Bernhard Riemann: his geometry of curved spaces later gave Einstein the mathematical frame for general relativity.

Which English mathematician turned logic into algebra with two-valued operators in 1847?

George Boole: the son of a shoemaker, he became professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork.

Ada Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer for her work on whose analytical engine?

Charles Babbage: the engine was never built, yet her notes set out how it could calculate Bernoulli numbers.

Which founder of set theory faced fierce public attacks from Leopold Kronecker?

Georg Cantor: he proved there are more real numbers than whole numbers, so some infinities are bigger than others.

Which German mathematician presented a famous list of unsolved problems in Paris in 1900?

David Hilbert: he closed a 1930 speech with 'We must know, we will know', and the words were later carved on his tomb.

Whose theorem connects symmetry with conservation laws in physics?

Emmy Noether: forced out of Göttingen by the Nazis in 1933, she spent her last two years at Bryn Mawr College in the US.

Why did the symmetry theorem’s author lecture for four years under another name?

The faculty objected to a woman teaching: German universities then kept women from the habilitation needed to lecture in their own name.

Who was the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics in the modern sense?

Sofya Kovalevskaya: Russian women needed a father's or husband's permission to study abroad, so at 18 she entered a marriage of convenience.

Which Frenchman found a chaotic deterministic system while studying the three-body problem?

Henri Poincaré: his prize-winning memoir on the problem contained a serious error, and fixing it gave birth to chaos theory.

Which self-taught Indian mathematician began corresponding with G. H. Hardy in 1913?

Srinivasa Ramanujan: Hardy was so struck by the theorems in his letters that he brought him to Cambridge in 1914.

G. H. Hardy's famous 1940 essay for the layperson about his craft is titled what?

A Mathematician's Apology: he wrote it believing his own creative powers were spent.

Which logician published the incompleteness theorems in 1931?

Kurt Gödel: when he became a US citizen, he was convinced he had found a flaw in the Constitution and tried to raise it.

Russell and Whitehead's three-volume work on logic is titled what?

Principia Mathematica: a fourth volume, on geometry, was planned but never finished.

Turing's Bletchley bombe built on earlier codebreaking work from which country?

Poland: its pre-war codebreakers devised the bomba, which Turing improved into a machine that could find Enigma settings.

Which Hungarian-American mathematician designed the implosion bomb's explosive lenses?

John von Neumann: the 'von' came from a Hungarian noble title his father acquired in 1913.

Claude Shannon, the MIT-trained engineer and mathematician, is known as the father of which field?

Information theory: as a 21-year-old master's student he had already shown that switching circuits could carry out logic.

Roughly how many papers did Paul Erdős publish, inspiring the Erdős number?

About 1,500: he travelled from one university and one mathematician's home to the next.

Which Princeton graduate student introduced the equilibrium concept central to game theory?

John Nash: days after collecting the 2015 Abel Prize in Norway, he and his wife were killed when their taxi crashed.

Who coined the word fractal while working as a mathematician at IBM?

Benoit Mandelbrot: at IBM he wrote some of the first programs to print computer graphics, which let him draw fractals.

Which Fields Medalist left IHÉS in 1970 over military funding and became a Pyrenees recluse?

Alexander Grothendieck: a pacifist, he had also refused to travel to Moscow in 1966 to collect his Fields Medal.

Who declined the Fields Medal in 2006?

Grigori Perelman: in 2010 he also turned down the $1 million Clay Millennium Prize for the same work.

Who became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, in 2014?

Maryam Mirzakhani: she had already been diagnosed with breast cancer when she won, and died three years later, aged 40.