HackingTheUniverse

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David Hilbert was born in 1862 in Germany and was a mathematician. He worked on creating a set of axioms as the foundation for Euclidean geometry. He was the creator of a concept of abstract vector space that extends mathematical techniques beyond Euclidean spaces into spaces of many dimensions. This is now know as “Hilbert [...]

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was born in 1826 in Breselenz, Germany. He worked on analytic geometry, algebraic geometry, and both non-euclidean and n-dimensional geometries. Some of this work laid important foundations for Einstein’s theory of relativity. He composed the famous “Riemann Hypothesis” which deals with predicting prime numbers. He was a student under Gauss. PRECURSOR: [...]

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 technology university [...]

Born near Hamburg, Germany in 1885, Hermann Weyl was a mathematician whose work had a strong influence on both physics and number theory. He worked on combining general relativity and the laws of electromagnetism. He worked with Lie algebras, symmetry and created the first version of gauge theory which attempted to describe both electromagnetic and [...]

Born in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany in 1882, Emmy Noether was a mathematician who laid the groundwork for the idea of symmetry in mathematics and physics. She studied the works of Hilbert, Klein and Minkowski and was peer with Hermann Weyl. Noether’s theorem – in 1915, she proved a relationship between symmetries in physics and conservations [...]

Albert Einstein was born in Wurttemburg, Germany in 1879 and become known as one of the greatest physicists and thinkers. PRECURSOR: -0300 – Euclid 1564 – Galileo 1642 – Newton 1777 – Gauss 1826 – Riemann 1831 – Maxwell 1838 – Mach 1849 – Klein 1853 – Lorentz 1854 – Poincare 1858 – Planck 1862 [...]

In 1931, Kurt Godel published two theorems of mathematical logic that have become known as the incompleteness theorems. Prior to these theorems, many mathematicians were trying to prove that all of mathematics could someday be encoded in a complete set of axioms. First incompleteness theorem: Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot [...]

Kurt Godel was born in Austria-Hungary in 1906. He was a mathematician and philosopher and was the most influential logician of his time. Godel is best known for his incompleteness theorems, proved in 1931, that demonstrate inherent limitations in symbolic systems. PRECURSOR: Goethe Newton Kant Liebnitz 1862 – Hilbert CONCURRENT: Einstein Russell Whitehead Heisenberg von [...]

Felix Christian Klein was born in Dusseldorf, Germany and was a mathematician. He did work on group theory and non-Euclidian geometry. He wrote a book on the icosahedron and created a 4-dimensional construct that is known as the “klein bottle”. PRECURSOR: Plucker 1826 – Riemann CONCURRENT: 1842 – Lie 1854 – Poincare 1862 – Hilbert [...]