Re: Who were the 25 Greatest Mathematicians?

On Oct 2, 10:55 pm, James Dow Allen <jdallen2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Who were the 25 Greatest Mathematicians?
I'm sure there'd be much controversy
over even the definition of "great" but
I've tried to construct a "Greatest" list:
http://james.fabpedigree.com/mathmen.htm
To qualify, the person's work must have
depth, breadth and historical importance.

I'm not qualified to make such a list, but
have tried to read opinions of those
who are better qualified. I hope to hear
more helpful criticism.

I hope you'll report errors and omissions
in my brief bios, and consider my explanations,
but here is a summary of the list:

1. Johann Carl F. Gauss (1777-1855)
2. Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 BC)
3. Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
4. Leonhard Euler (1707-1783)
5. Euclid of Alexandria (ca 322-275 BC)
6. Georg F. Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866)
7. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
8. Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)
9. Jules Henri Poincare (1854-1912)
10. Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)
11. Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)
12. Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829)
13. David Hilbert (1862-1943)
14. Brahmagupta `Bhillamalacarya' (589-668)
15. Georg Cantor (1845-1918)
16. Leonardo `Fibonacci' Pisano (ca 1170-1245)
17. Carl G. J. Jacobi (1804-1851)
18. Evariste Galois (1811-1832)
19. Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
20. John von Neumann (1903-1957)
21. Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789-1857)
22. Karl Wilhelm Theodor Weierstrass (1815-1897)
23. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
24. Arthur Cayley (1821-1895)
25. Aryabhatta (476-550)

James Dow Allen


It's a good list, though it looks pretty much like a consensus,
i.e.,
a lot of these people have been on many previous lists. And in how
many cases do we have direct familiarity with the work of these
people? E.g., I cannot say I have ever read a paper by Jacobi.

It's striking also how many of these people straddled the fence
between math and physics - I would include Gauss, Archimedes, Newton,
Euler, Lagrange, Poincare, Hilbert, von Neumann, and others. Recent
Fields Medalists are mostly not straddling both math and physics,
with the exception of Edward Witten. Math has its roots, some so
deep that they are taken for granted, in the physical world; it
would be a shame in my view for the two fields to keep diverging,
even though some of mathematical physics now is, frankly, ugly and
numerical and approximative (because the really hard messy problems
don't have analytic solutions).

Marcus.


.

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