50 Fun Facts About Famous Mathematicians

Which ancient Greek is known as the father of geometry for his treatise the Elements?

He worked in Alexandria around 300 BC and deduced his theorems from a small set of axioms.

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

Cicero later visited the tomb in Syracuse; Archimedes had found the relation between the two volumes.

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

He was killed by a Roman soldier despite orders that he be spared.

Pythagoras founded his secretive school in which southern Italian town around 530 BC?

Initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic life.

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

He even thought the Earth floated on it; he is often called the first Greek philosopher.

Hypatia, the first female mathematician whose life is well recorded, taught in which city?

She was murdered by a mob in March 415 AD during a feud between the prefect Orestes and Bishop Cyril.

Which Indian mathematician is credited as the first to formalize the concept of zero?

His 628 treatise also gave the first clear description of the quadratic formula.

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

Al-Jabr gave the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations around 820.

Which Persian poet-mathematician first solved cubic equations in general using conic sections?

His astronomy also underpins the Persian calendar still in use.

Fibonacci's 1202 book that popularized Indo-Arabic numerals in Europe was called what?

The famous sequence appeared in it as a worked example about rabbits.

What does the nickname Fibonacci mean?

His real name was Leonardo Bonacci, or Leonardo da Pisa.

Which French mathematician wrote his Last Theorem in the margin of a copy of Diophantus?

He was also a lawyer at the parlement of Toulouse and a skilled poet.

Who finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem, earning the 2016 Abel Prize?

He set out in 1986 after reading Ken Ribet's work and convinced a colleague by 1993.

Blaise Pascal wrote a significant treatise on conic sections at what age?

His father Étienne, a tax collector, educated him; the SI unit of pressure bears his name.

What early calculating machines did Pascal begin building in 1642?

They made him one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.

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

The Cartesian coordinate system is named after him.

Isaac Newton shares credit for calculus with which German polymath?

Newton developed it first, but Leibniz's notation 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?

He spent most of his adult life in Saint Petersburg and Berlin.

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

He applied mathematics to fluid mechanics and pioneered probability and statistics.

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

The 17-sided figure made his name; he later directed the Göttingen Observatory.

Gauss helped identify which dwarf planet by predicting its orbit?

The work led to his method of least squares, discovered before Legendre published it.

Which Italian-born mathematician succeeded Euler in Berlin and wrote Mécanique analytique?

He was born Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia and later helped decimalize Revolutionary France.

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

He wrote the five-volume Mécanique céleste and imagined an all-predicting demon.

Under what male pseudonym did Sophie Germain correspond with Lagrange and Gauss?

She won the Paris Academy's grand prize for her work on elasticity.

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

A staunch Republican, he had been jailed for political activism shortly before.

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

Hermite said he left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Who first rigorously stated and proved the key theorems of calculus, creating real analysis?

He also pioneered complex analysis and permutation groups.

Whose 1859 paper on counting primes contains the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics?

His differential geometry also laid the mathematical foundations of general relativity.

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

The shoemaker's son became the first mathematics professor at Queen's College, Cork.

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

She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron.

Which founder of set theory was attacked by Kronecker as a corrupter of youth?

He proved the real numbers are more numerous than the naturals, implying an infinity of infinities.

In 1900, which German presented a list of problems that set the course for 20th-century mathematics?

He was also a co-founder of proof theory and defended Cantor's transfinite numbers.

Whose theorem connects symmetry with conservation laws in physics?

Einstein and Weyl called her the most important woman in the history of mathematics.

Why did the author of the symmetry theorem lecture under Hilbert's name for four years?

Her habilitation was finally approved in 1919; she fled to Bryn Mawr in 1933.

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

The Russian also became the first woman in modern Europe appointed a full professor of mathematics.

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

He is regarded as the creator of algebraic topology and called The Last Universalist.

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

He compiled nearly 3,900 results; Hardy said some defeated him completely.

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

Graham Greene ranked it with the notebooks of Henry James.

Which logician published the incompleteness theorems in 1931?

He coded formal expressions as natural numbers, a technique now called Gödel numbering.

Russell and Whitehead's attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic was titled what?

Russell's article On Denoting is considered a paradigm of philosophy.

Which section of Bletchley Park did Alan Turing lead against German naval ciphers?

He improved the Polish bomba into a machine that could find Enigma settings.

Which Hungarian-American mathematician developed the explosive lenses for the implosion bomb?

He also pioneered game theory, cellular automata and the digital computer.

Claude Shannon's 1937 MIT master's thesis showed that circuits could implement what?

It has been called the most important master's thesis of all time.

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

He worked with more than 500 collaborators and died at a conference in Warsaw in 1996.

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

He shared the 1994 prize with Harsanyi and Selten and won the 2015 Abel Prize.

Who coined the word fractal and first displayed the famous set that bears his name at IBM?

He called himself a fractalist and studied the art of roughness.

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

Many consider him the greatest mathematician of the 20th century.

Who proved the Poincaré conjecture and then declined the Fields Medal in 2006?

He said he did not want to be on display like an animal in a zoo.

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

The Iranian Stanford professor died of breast cancer at 40 in 2017.