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unusual facts about mathematicians



1873 in Denmark

The Danish Mathematical Society, a society of Danish mathematicians, is founded at the University of Copenhagen.

Abraham Adrian Albert

He served on policy-making bodies at the Office of Naval Research, the United States National Research Council, and the National Science Foundation that funneled research grants into mathematics, giving many young mathematicians career opportunities previously unavailable.

Agner Krarup Erlang

He was a member of the Danish Mathematicians' Association (TBMI) and through this met amateur mathematician Johan Jensen, the Chief Engineer of the Copenhagen Telephone Company (KTAS in Danish), an offshoot of the International Bell Telephone Company.

Ali Abdullah Al-Daffa

A visiting Professor at King Saud University, Riyadh (1979–1982), and at Harvard University, USA (1983), Prof. Daffa' was twice elected President of the Union of Arab Mathematicians and Physicists (1979–1981 and 1986–1988).

Bateman–Horn conjecture

In number theory, the Bateman–Horn conjecture is a statement concerning the frequency of prime numbers among the values of a system of polynomials, named after mathematicians Paul T. Bateman and Roger A Horn, of The University of Utah, who proposed it in 1962.

Brendan McKay

Outside of this specialty, McKay is best known for his collaborative work with a group of Israeli mathematicians that criticizes the Bible code hypothesis by arguing that the patterns in the Bible that supposedly indicate some hidden message from a divine source or have predictive power can be just as easily found in other works, such as War and Peace.

Brouwer fixed-point theorem

The theorem was first studied in view of work on differential equations by the French mathematicians around Poincaré and Picard.

C.S. Venkitaraman

On account of his professional and academic achievements, his name finds, justifiable, a place in the World Directory of Mathematicians published in 1986 under the auspices of the International Mathematical Union.

Cadambathur Tiruvenkatacharlu Rajagopal

He showed that the series for tan1x discovered by James Gregory and those for sin x and cos x discovered by Isaac Newton were known to the Hindu mathematicians 150 years earlier.

Chess puzzle

Many famous mathematicians have studied such problems, including Euler, Legendre, and Gauss.

Class field theory

Higher local and global class field theory was developed by A. Parshin, Kazuya Kato, Ivan Fesenko, Spencer Bloch, Shuji Saito and other mathematicians.

David Hilbert

At the University of Göttingen, Hilbert was surrounded by a social circle of some of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, such as Emmy Noether and Alonzo Church.

David L. Downie

Dr. Whitman is the daughter of Marina von Neumann Whitman, the noted economist, and Robert Freeman Whitman, professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and the granddaughter of John von Neumann, one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century.

Dénes Kőnig

During which he studied under a famous Mathematicians József Kürschák and Hermann Minkowski.

Digitalism

Digital philosophy, a direction in philosophy and cosmology advocated by certain mathematicians and theoretical physicists

Earth's orbit

Mathematicians and astronomers (such as Laplace, Lagrange, Gauss, Poincaré, Kolmogorov, Vladimir Arnold, and Jürgen Moser) have searched for evidence for the stability of the planetary motions, and this quest led to many mathematical developments, and several successive 'proofs' of stability for the solar system.

Felix Browder

Felix Browder is the father of Bill Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, and is the brother of two other research mathematicians, William Browder (an algebraic topologist) and Andrew Browder (a specialist in function algebras).

Florence Nightingale David

:::Wrote a book on History of probability, using problems thought of by famous mathematicians and scientists like Cardano and Galileo.

Geometric algebra

Physicists and mathematicians alike readily adopted it as their geometrical toolkit of choice, particularly following the influential 1901 textbook Vector Analysis by Edwin Bidwell Wilson, following lectures of Gibbs.

Georg Feigl

His wife Maria was distantly related to the lord of the manor of Wechselburg castle and prepared the castle to receive the mathematicians.

George Szekeres

Szekeres worked closely with many prominent mathematicians throughout his life, including Paul Erdős, Esther Szekeres (née Esther Klein), Paul Turán, Béla Bollobás, Ronald Graham, Alf van der Poorten, Miklós Laczkovich, and John Coates.

Giuseppe Pompilj

In 1942 he was lecturer in geometry (he had studied algebraic geometry under the guidance of Federigo Enriques and other Roman mathematicians).

Henri Cartan

Cartan used his influence to help obtain the release of some dissident mathematicians, including Leonid Plyushch and Jose Luis Massera.

History of manifolds and varieties

In 2003, Grigori Perelman proved the conjecture using Richard Hamilton's Ricci flow, this is after nearly a century of effort by many mathematicians.

Institute for Mathematics and its Applications

Sharing a very similar name, and the acronym IMA, it should not be confused with the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, a professional body for mathematicians in the UK.

Ivo Babuška

The BB condition has guided mathematicians and engineers to develop state-of-the-art formulations for many technologically important problems like Darcy flow, Stokes flow, incompressible Navier-Stokes, nearly incompressible elasticity.

Jacques Herbrand

Although he died at only 23 years of age, he was already considered one of "the greatest mathematicians of the younger generation" by his professors Helmut Hasse, and Richard Courant.

János Kollár

He was also selected as a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians to be held in 2014 in Seoul.

Kazimierz Kuratowski

Moreover, with Alfred Tarski and Wacław Sierpiński he provided most of the theory concerning Polish spaces (that are indeed named after these mathematicians and their legacy).

M. B. W. Tent

Her books have also received praise from other authors and mathematicians like William Dunham, Peter Lax, Cathleen Synge Morawetz, Charles Ashbacher and Peter M. Neumann.

Mathematical chess problem

Many famous mathematicians studied mathematical chess problems, for example, Euler, Legendre and Gauss.

Mathesis universalis

Mathesis universalis (Greek μάθησις, mathesis "science or learning", Latin universalis "universal") is a hypothetical universal science modeled on mathematics envisaged by Descartes and Leibniz, among a number of more minor 16th and 17th century philosophers and mathematicians.

Mathland

Mathland was among the math curricula rated as "promising" by an Education Department panel, although subsequently 200 mathematicians and scientists, including four Nobel Prize recipients and two winners of the Fields Medal, published a letter in the Washington Post deploring the findings of that panel.

Mergelyan's theorem

After Weierstrass and Runge, many mathematicians (in particular Walsh, Keldysh, and Lavrentyev) had been working on the same problem.

National Conference on Mathematical and Computational Models

From December 15, 2005 to December 16, 2005, the sessions were named after famous mathematicians such as Andrey Markov, G H Hardy and Ramanujan.

Norman J. Pullman

During his career, he supervised mathematicians like Dominique de Caen, Rolf S. Rees, and Bill Jackson, among others.

Ordinary differential equation

Many mathematicians have studied differential equations and contributed to the field, including Newton, Leibniz, the Bernoulli family, Riccati, Clairaut, d'Alembert, and Euler.

Orthogonal polynomials

Some of the mathematicians who have worked on orthogonal polynomials include Gábor Szegő, Sergei Bernstein, Naum Akhiezer, Arthur Erdélyi, Yakov Geronimus, Wolfgang Hahn, Theodore Seio Chihara, Mourad Ismail, Waleed Al-Salam, and Richard Askey.

Philippe Le Corbeiller

He was a close friend of Dutch physicist Balthasar van der Pol, whose work on nonlinear self-oscillating dynamical systems (see van der Pol oscillator) he extended and popularized among electrical engineers, mathematicians, and economists.

Piers Wardle

Wardle was perhaps the first British painter to experiment artistically with the ideas of Benoit Mandelbrot and other 'chaos' mathematicians, exploring in his work how 'the complexity associated with natural and organic forms can be generated, in appearance at least, by simple rules' (from Piers Wardle's catalogue for an exhibition held at the Pomeroy Purdy Gallery in April 1989).

Quasi-empiricism in mathematics

This and other evidence led many mathematicians to reject the label of Platonists, along with Plato's ontology—which, along with the methods and epistemology of Aristotle, had served as a foundation ontology for the Western world since its beginnings.

Salvatore Pincherle

In 1924, he attended the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Toronto, Canada.

Suzan Kahramaner

She participated in the Scandinavian Congress of Mathematicians, International Colloquium on the Theory of Functions, in Helsinki the very same year in August and had the opportunity to meet some of the famous Mathematicians like Ernst Hölder, Wilhelm Blaschke, Lars Valerian Ahlfors, Paul Montel, O. Lehto, M. Biernacki, Alexander Gelfond, A. Pfluger, W. Kaplan, Walter Hayman and Paul Erdős.

Talking past each other

1917 — Albert Einstein and David Hilbert had dawn-to-dusk discussions of physics; and they continued their debate in writing, although Felix Klein records that they talked past each other, as happens not infrequently between simultaneously producing mathematicians.

The Analyst, or, Mathematical Museum

Despite its extremely short life, it published papers by several notable mathematicians in the nascent American mathematical community, including Nathaniel Bowditch and Ferdinand Hassler; most importantly, Adrain himself published an independent formulation of the method of least squares.


see also