HackingTheUniverse

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Heron was born around 0010 and was a Greek mathematician, engineer and inventor who lived in Alexandria, Egypt when it was a province of the Roman Empire. He designed the first known simple steam engine (the aeolipile or Hero’s engine), the first vending machine, a wind powered organ, a water displacement pump (fire engine [...]

Marin Mersenne was born in France in 1588 and studied theology, philosophy, mathematics and music. He is known for some of the first major contributions to acoustics and for his work compiling a list of large prime numbers by using the form 2^p - 1 where p is a known prime number. [raise 2 [...]

Hermann Minkowski was born in Lithuania in 1864 and was a mathematician who also did work in mathematical physics and relativity. “Minkowski Space” is a manifold constructed with three space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension to create the four dimensional spacetime continuum associated with relativity theory. When he taught at a science and [...]

Rene Descartes was born in France in 1596. He is known as “the father of modern philosophy” and also contributed to mathematics and general science. The cartesian coordinate system is named for him and he created analytic geometry. He also did some work in the field of optics, with both refraction and reflection.
Prior to Descartes, [...]

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered [...]

Omar Khayyam was born in Persia in 1048 and was a mathematician, astronomer and poet. He was known for using a geometric approach to analyzing algebra problems and for solving cubic equations using line segments. He noted that solving the cubic required the use of conic sections and could not be solved simply [...]

Albert Einstein was born in Wurttemburg, Germany in 1879 and become known as one of the greatest physicists and thinkers.
PRECURSOR:
-0300 - Euclid
Galileo
Newton
1777 - Gauss
Maxwell
Poincare
Mach
1826 - Riemann
CONCURRENT:
Minkowski
Schroedinger
Planck
de Broglie
Bose
Hilbert
1849 - Klein
1853 - Lorentz
1885 - Bohr
1885 - Kaluza
1901 - Heisenberg
1902 - Dirac
1906 - Godel
SUBSEQUENT:
Hawking
SEE ALSO:
Albert Einstein Online - [westegg.com]
Einstein’s Big Idea - [pbs.org]
Einstein - [amnh.org]

Pythagoras was a Greek mathematician born around -575 on the island of Samos. He is best known for the “Pythagorean theorem” which states that in a triangle with a ninety degree angle (right angle), a square formed by the long side opposite the right angle (the hypotenuse) is equal to the sum of the squares [...]