Who are the top five most influential mathematicians? I have five in mind that are important and are helpful when teaching math as related to MathCounts. Many students do not know of any mathematicians and I think it is important to teach some of the more important and influential mathematicians. It is also possible to study some of the lesser known but just as important mathematicians, but that would be for a more advanced class. I usually have the students learn some basic facts and the date of birth using the Peg System. Here are my top five. What do you think?
1. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777-1855
Gauss is the undisputed champ in my book. His great genius was demonstrated at a young age. When he was in school, his teacher gave the class a task that he thought would take a long time to complete. His task was to sum the first 100 numbers. Gauss completed the task in a very short time. Much later, when the teacher checked the answers, Gauss had the correct answer. He summed the first hundred numbers not by addition, but by multiplication. He found that there are 50 pairs of 101. And 50 x 101 = 5050. He would always tell this story later in his life on how he was the first to complete the task.
He did not publish much and his motto of ” few, but ripe” reflected his style of not publishing his mathematics until it was polished to perfection. Many times, other mathematicians would publish their findings and Gauss would say that he already knew about it. His work in number theory has shaped the way it is presented today.
2. Archimedes cira 287-212 B.C.
Archimedes spent most of his productive years in Syracuse. Many engineering students know him for his mechanical contraptions such as the screw pump, a claw that could flip a ship, and the heat ray that would use mirrors to burn a hole in a ship and sink it. In mathematics, he gave very close approximations of pi. Archimedes was always more interested in the theoretical studies than the more practical applications of his inventions. He died when a Roman soldier killed him after Archimedes refused to move away from his geometry problem that he was working on in the sand with a stick.
3. Newton 1643-1727
Newton gave us Newton’s laws of motion and of universal gravitation. He, along with Leibniz, developed calculus. Many topics in physical science and math are related to Newton and all of his discoveries.
4. Bernhard Riemann 1826-1866
Riemann’s paper, published in 1859, titled ” On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity” has sparked much interest and research into the question of how the prime numbers are structured. This is the greatest unsolved mathematics problem and students are real interested to know what the problem is about. This is a very interesting topic for a club like MathCounts were number theory and prime numbers come up all the time. I recommend the book Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire for a interesting read with some good history and mathematics.
5. Paul Erdos 1913-1996
Erdos was an interesting mathematician. He was very social and always tried to work with others. He was the opposite of Gauss who liked to work alone. He called young students “epsilons”, which means a little. He would give challenges to students to prove small theorems and pay them if they could prove it. He liked to travel around the world to work with other mathematicians and would say ” another roof, another proof”. His whole life was mathematics. He did not know how to drive or even how to do his laundry. He hated to waste time on anything but mathematics. Others who have published with him are given an Erdos number. The lower the number, the more directly related to working with him you are. I wish I had met him.
YES THEY WERE GREAT
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vishal ku ranjan,
Thanks for visiting. I see you enjoy mathematics also.
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manan sharma Reply:
January 16th, 2012 at 10:46 pm
they were so intilegent and great
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hey where is abel?
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Kevin Smith Reply:
November 14th, 2011 at 12:14 am
Thanks,
Niels Abel is on my next list.
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Despite his genius, the placement of Newton ahead of Riemann is highly questionable. All Newton’s math work would have happened even if he did not touch those subjects. I am sure that most of Riemann’s work would not happen because all he did was revolution.
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Kevin Smith Reply:
January 19th, 2012 at 10:25 am
Hi Ninck,
I see what you have to say, but considering the students are only 14 years old, I thought Newton was more influential to this age group as he is has more connections to science and mathematics which are easier to teach at this level. On a purely theoretical note, Riemann has the deeper and more interesting theorem about the nature of the primes and how the number system fits together.
Kevin
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Paul Erdos is my hero!!
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Kevin Smith Reply:
February 19th, 2012 at 10:56 pm
Rajan,
Thanks for visiting, I like your website with all the division problems.
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The title is asking for the most infuential mathematicians. Most great mathematicians have been and are influential because their ideas could generate other great ideas. We must weigh the importance of each math work left behind by those greats.
For example Newton, great in phyisics but not equally great in the math revolution. Summary of Newton’s work from the math history http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Newton.html:
“Isaac Newton was the greatest English mathematician of his generation. He laid the foundation for differential and integral calculus. His work on optics and gravitation make him one of the greatest scientists the world has known.”
But the integral calculus had been published seven years earlier by Leibnitz! Would be a great provocation to belive that without Newton there will be no calculus today! Proof is so simple knowing that Fermat made calculations similar to the simple ones we make today by using the derivatives. Quote from Wiki:
“In particular, he (n.a.Fermat) is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of the then unknown differential calculus, and his research into number theory”
In today’s modern math, Archimede also did not produce much, even if for his time was a giant-genius.
Some people made positive comments about Riemann and Galois. These two along with Gauss, Euler, and Cauchy, are the mathematicians who have made revolution in mathematics.
Dare to imagine Number Theory without Riemann! Or complex function analysis, foundation of geometry, etc.
From Wiki:
”Riemann’s published works opened up research areas combining analysis with geometry. These would subsequently become major parts of the theories of Riemannian geometry, algebraic geometry, and complex manifold theory. The theory of Riemann surfaces was elaborated by Felix Klein and particularly Adolf Hurwitz. This area of mathematics is part of the foundation of topology, and is still being applied in novel ways to mathematical physics.
Riemann made major contributions to real analysis. He defined the Riemann integral by means of Riemann sums, developed a theory of trigonometric series that are not Fourier series—a first step in generalized function theory—and studied the Riemann–Liouville differintegral.
He made some famous contributions to modern analytic number theory. In a single short paper (the only one he published on the subject of number theory), he introduced the Riemann zeta function and established its importance for understanding the distribution of prime numbers. He made a series of conjectures about properties of the zeta function, one of which is the well-known Riemann hypothesis”
“Riemann’s idea was to introduce a collection of numbers at every point in space (i.e., a tensor) which would describe how much it was bent or curved. Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions, one needs a collection of ten numbers at each point to describe the properties of a manifold, no matter how distorted it is. This is the famous construction central to his geometry, known now as a Riemannian metric.”
“He was also the first to suggest using dimensions higher than merely three or four in order to describe physical reality[2]—an idea that was ultimately vindicated with Einstein’s contribution in the early 20th century.”
Imagine that he lived twenty more years! Dead at 40..what a world!
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