10 Great Mathematicians

Submitted By: Justin VII Malikhain

Submitted To: Mrs. Garcia

Ren Dscartes (1596-1650)

Dscartes developed laws of motion (including a "vortex" theory of gravitation) which were very influential, though largely incorrect. His famous mathematical theorems include the Rule of Signs (for determining the signs of polynomial roots), the elegant formula relating the radii of Soddy kissing circles, his theorem on total angular defect, and an improved solution to the Delian problem (cube-doubling). He improved mathematical notation (e.g. the use of superscripts to denote exponents). He also discovered Euler's Polyhedral Theorem, F+V = E+2.

John Napier 8th of Merchistoun (1550-1617)

Napier was a Scottish Laird who was a noted theologian and thought by many to be a magician (his nickname was Marvellous Merchiston). Today, however, he is best known for his work with logarithms, a word he invented. (Several others, including Archimedes, had anticipated the use of logarithms.) He published the first large table of logarithms and also helped popularize usage of the decimal point and lattice multiplication. He invented Napier's Bones, a crude hand calculator which could be used for division and root extraction, as well as multiplication. He also had inventions outside mathematics, including war machines.

Simon Stevin (1549-1620)

Stevin was first to write on the concept of unstable equilibrium. He invented improved accounting methods, and the equal-temperament music scale. He also did work in descriptive geometry, trigonometry, optics, geography, and astronomy. In mathematics, Stevin is best known for the notion of real numbers (previously integers, rationals and irrationals were treated separately) and for introducing decimal fractions to Europe. His theorems include the Intermediate Value Theorem attributed to Cauchy. He also invented basic notation like the symbol ; Stevin's historical importance may warrant a place on the List despite that he may have proved no difficult theorems of pure mathematics.

Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)

Pierre de Fermat was the most brilliant mathematician of his era and, along with Dscartes, one of the most influential. Although mathematics was just his hobby (Fermat was a government lawyer), Fermat practically founded Number Theory, and also played key roles in the discoveries of Analytic Geometry and Calculus. He was also an excellent geometer (e.g. discovering a triangle's Fermat point), and (in collaboration with Blaise Pascal) discovered probability theory. Fellow geniuses are the best judges of genius, and Blaise Pascal had this to say of Fermat: "For my part, I confess that [Fermat's researches about numbers] are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them." E.T. Bell wrote "it can be argued that Fermat was at least Newton's equal as a pure mathematician."

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Pascal was an outstanding genius who studied geometry as a child. At the age of sixteen he stated and proved Pascal's Theorem, a fact relating any six points on any conic section. The Theorem is sometimes called the "Cat's Cradle" or the "Mystic Hexagram." Pascal followed up this result by showing that each of Apollonius' famous theorems about conic sections was a corollary of the Mystic Hexagram; along with Gerard Desargues (1591-1661), he was a key pioneer of projective geometry. He also made important early contributions to calculus; indeed it was his writings that inspired Leibniz. Returning to geometry late in life, Pascal advanced the theory of the cycloid. In addition to his work in geometry and calculus, he founded probability theory, and made contributions to axiomatic theory. His name is associated with the Pascal's Triangle of combinatorics and Pascal's Wager in theology.

Isaac (Sir) Newton (1642-1727)

Newton is regarded as the Father of Calculus (which he called "fluxions"); he shares credit with Leibniz for the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (that integration and differentiation are each other's inverse operation). He applied calculus for several purposes: finding areas, tangents, the lengths of curves and the maxima and minima of functions. In addition to several other important advances in analytic geometry, his mathematical works include the Binomial Theorem, his eponymous numeric method, the idea of polar coordinates, and power series for exponential and trigonometric functions. (His equation

ex = xk / k! has been called the "most important series in mathematics.") He contributed to algebra and the theory of equations; he was first to state Bzout's Theorem; he generalized Dscartes' rule of signs. (The generalized rule of signs was incomplete and finally resolved two centuries later by Sturm and Sylvester.) He developed a series for the arcsin function. He developed facts about cubic equations (just as the "shadows of a cone" yield all quadratic curves, Newton found a curve whose "shadows" yield all cubic curves). He proved that same-mass spheres of any radius have equal gravitational attraction: this fact is key to celestial motions. He discovered Puiseux series almost two centuries before they were re-invented by Puiseux.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716)

Leibniz pioneered the common discourse of mathematics, including its continuous, discrete, and symbolic aspects. (His ideas on symbolic logic weren't pursued and it was left to Boole to reinvent this almost two centuries later.) Mathematical innovations attributed to Leibniz include the symbols ,df(x)/dx; the concepts of matrix determinant and Gaussian elimination; the theory of geometric envelopes; and the binary number system. He invented more mathematical terms than anyone, including "function," "analysis situ," "variable," "abscissa," "parameter," and "coordinate." His works seem to anticipate cybernetics and information theory; and Mandelbrot acknowledged Leibniz' anticipation of self-similarity. Like Newton, Leibniz discovered The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus; his contribution to calculus was much more influential than Newton's, and his superior notation is used to this day. As Leibniz himself pointed out, since the concept of mathematical analysis was already known to ancient Greeks, the revolutionary invention was notation ("calculus"), because with "symbols [which] express the exact nature of a thing briefly ... the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished."

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)

Just as Archimedes extended Euclid's geometry to marvelous heights, so Euler took marvelous advantage of the analysis of Newton and Leibniz: He gave the world modern trigonometry, pioneered (along with Lagrange) the calculus of variations, generalized and proved the Newton-Giraud formulae, etc. He was also supreme at discrete mathematics, inventing graph theory. He also invented the concept of generating functions; for example, letting p(n) denote the number of partitions of n, Euler found the lovely equation: n p(n) xn = 1 / k (1 - xk)

Euler was also a major figure in number theory: He proved that the sum of the reciprocals of primes less than x is approx. (ln ln x), invented the totient function and used it to generalize Fermat's Little Theorem, found both the largest then-known prime and the largest then-known perfect number, provede to be irrational, proved that all even perfect numbers must have the Mersenne number form that Euclid had discovered 2000 years earlier, and much more. Euler was also first to prove several interesting theorems of geometry, including facts about the 9-point Feuerbach circle; relationships among a triangle's altitudes, medians, and circumscribing and inscribing circles; and an expression for a tetrahedron's area in terms of its sides. Euler was first to explore topology, proving theorems about the Euler characteristic, and the famous Euler's Polyhedral Theorem, F+V = E+2 (although it may have been discovered by Dscartes and first proved rigorously by Jordan). Although noted as the first great "pure mathematician," Euler engineered a system of pumps, wrote on philosophy, and made important contributions to music theory, acoustics, optics, celestial motions and mechanics. He extended Newton's Laws of Motion to rotating rigid bodies; and developed the EulerBernoulli beam equation.

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Carl Friedrich Gauss, the "Prince of Mathematics," exhibited his calculative powers when he corrected his father's arithmetic before the age of three. His revolutionary nature was demonstrated at age twelve, when he began questioning the axioms of Euclid. His genius was confirmed at the age of nineteen when he proved that the regular n-gon was constructible if n is the product of distinct prime Fermat numbers. Although he published fewer papers than some other great mathematicians, Gauss may be the greatest theorem prover ever. Several important theorems and lemmas bear his name; he was first to produce a complete proof of Euclid's Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic (that every natural number has a unique expression as product of primes); and first to produce a rigorous proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (that an n-th degree polynomial has n complex roots). Gauss himself used "Fundamental Theorem" to refer to Euler's Law of Quadratic Reciprocity; Gauss was first to provide a proof for this, and provided eight distinct proofs for it over the years. Gauss proved the n=3 case of Fermat's Last Theorem for a class of complex integers; though more general, the proof was simpler than the real integer proof, a discovery which revolutionized algebra. Other work by Gauss led to fundamental theorems in statistics, vector analysis, function theory, and generalizations of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.

Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857)

Cauchy's research also included differential equations, determinants, and probability. He invented the calculus of residues. Although he was one of the first great mathematicians to focus on abstract mathematics (another was Euler), he also made important contributions to mathematical physics, e.g. the theory of elasticity. Cauchy's theorem of solid geometry is important in rigidity theory; the Cauchy-Schwarz Inequality has very wide application (e.g. as the basis for Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle); the famous Burnside's Counting Theorem was first discovered by Cauchy; etc. He was first to prove Taylor's Theorem rigorously, and first to prove Fermat's conjecture that every positive integer can be expressed as the sum of k k-gon numbers for any k.