MATHEMATICIANS Flashcards
Which army-educated Hungarian mathematician, passionate violinist and master fencer once accepted duel challenges from thirteen officers and defeated them all, playing each loser a piece on his violin? He was also a polyglot who spoke nine foreign languages, including Chinese and Tibetan. Within mathematics, he is best known as one of the founders of non-Euclidean geometry and absolute geometry.
Janos BOLYAI
2019 female winner Abel Prize
Karen UHLENBECK
Which German-born mathematician and pioneer of modern algebraic geometry was the son of Russian Jewish anarchist Sascha Schapiro and remained stateless for most of his working life? After retiring in 1988, he moved to the tiny village of Lasserre at the foot of the Pyrenees, where he concentrated on philosophy in complete solitude.
Alexander GROTHENDIECK
Which Japanese mathematician of the Edo period, who discovered Bernoulli numbers, the determinant and many other results independently of his European contemporaries, is popularly known as “Japan’s Newton”?
Seki TAKAKAZU
In 2008, which English mathematician succeeded Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford? His extensive work in popular mathematics includes the 2003 book The Music of the Primes and the BBC Four documentary The Story of Maths.
Marcus Du SAUTOY
Which Australian–American mathematician of Chinese heritage is the youngest winner of the bronze (age 10), silver (age 11) and gold (age 12) medals at the International Mathematics Olympiad? Such is his reputation in the mathematical community that it is frequently joked that the quickest way to solve an intractable mathematical problem is to pique his interest in it.
Terry TAO
In an essay on the future of mathematics published in 1908, which French polymath remarked that “Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things”? He is often called the “last universalist” on account of his mastery of all branches of mathematics as they existed in his day.
HENRI POINCARE
Which Polish-born mathematician was invited by Von Neumann to join the Manhattan Project in 1943, during which time he solved the problem of initiating fusion in the hydrogen bomb alongside Edward Teller? While at Los Alamos he also developed the Monte Carlo method for obtaining solutions to problems by repeated random sampling, so named because his uncle was an inveterate gambler.
STANISLAW ULAM
a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was a pioneer for women in mathematics around the world – the first woman to obtain a doctorate (in the modern sense) in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor.[1]
Sofya KOVALEVSKYA
26 May 1667 – 27 November 1754) was a French mathematician known for XXXXXXs formula, a formula that links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory
Abraham de MOIVRES
The least-squares method was officially discovered and published by which man (1805)
Adrien Marie LEGENDRE
21 August 1789 – 23 May 1857) was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist who made pioneering contributions to several branches of mathematics, including mathematical analysis and continuum mechanics. He was one of the first to state and rigorously prove theorems of calculus, rejecting the heuristic principle of the generality of algebra of earlier authors. He almost singlehandedly founded complex analysis and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra.
Augustin-Louis CAUCHY
generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.[2]
Joseph FOURIER
