Mathematicians Through Time

Descartes published La Géométrie in 1637 as one of three appendices to his Discourse on Method. The work helped connect algebraic equations with geometric curves.

Newton was born on Christmas Day in 1642 according to the calendar then used in England. On the modern Gregorian calendar, his birthday is January 4, 1643.

Leibniz designed an early mechanical calculator in the 1670s, intended to perform multiplication and division as well as addition and subtraction—centuries before electronic computers.

Jacob Bernoulli's major probability book, Ars Conjectandi, appeared in 1713, eight years after his death. It included a foundational version of the law of large numbers.

Brook Taylor was also an accomplished musician and painter. His 1715 book on linear perspective used mathematics to explain vanishing points in drawings.

Euler continued producing remarkable amounts of mathematics after becoming almost completely blind. Nearly half of his published work came after his return to St Petersburg in 1766.

Lagrange originally expected to pursue law and found classical geometry unappealing. Reading Edmund Halley's work on algebra and optics helped spark his interest in mathematics.

Napoleon appointed Laplace minister of the interior in 1799 but dismissed him after only six weeks. Napoleon later joked that Laplace had brought infinitesimal thinking into government.

Before developing his theory of heat conduction, Fourier joined Napoleon's 1798 expedition to Egypt as a scientific adviser and helped establish a scientific institute in Cairo.

Sophie Germain wrote to Gauss under the male pseudonym M. LeBlanc. Her identity came to light after she tried to protect him during the French occupation of his hometown.

In 1801, Gauss used limited observations to predict where astronomers could find Ceres after it disappeared behind the Sun. His calculation helped recover the newly discovered object.

As a child, Cauchy encountered Laplace and Lagrange, who visited his family's home. Lagrange reportedly encouraged his father to emphasize language studies before advanced mathematics.

While working in his family's flour mill in Nottingham, Green taught himself advanced mathematics. His groundbreaking 1828 essay on electricity and magnetism was privately published with just 51 subscribers.

Jacobi advanced so quickly in school that he was academically ready for university at age twelve. Berlin's university would not admit students younger than sixteen.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, whom she never came to know. Her mother encouraged her study of mathematics, and she later wrote influential notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine.

According to a well-known biographical account, Riemann read a 900-page book on number theory by Legendre in just six days while he was still a schoolboy.

Heaviside left school at sixteen and worked as a telegraph operator. Fascinated by Maxwell's theory, he later left his job to study it full-time and helped reformulate Maxwell's original system into the four vector equations familiar today.

Runge spent his early childhood in Havana and grew up speaking English at home. At university he became a close friend of Max Planck, the future pioneer of quantum theory.

In 1913, Markov analyzed 20,000 letters from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, recording how often vowels and consonants followed one another. It became a famous early demonstration of Markov chains.

Kutta developed an influential numerical method for differential equations in his 1900 doctoral thesis. He later studied aerodynamics, including the mathematical description of lift on aircraft wings.

Before Emmy Noether received permission to teach officially at Göttingen in 1919, David Hilbert advertised some of her mathematics courses under his own name.

During Britain's 1926 General Strike, fourteen-year-old Alan Turing reportedly cycled about sixty miles to get to school when normal transport was disrupted.