HackingTheUniverse

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William Rowan Hamilton was born in 1805 in Dublin, Ireland and was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer. In mathematics, he studied number theory and various forms of algebras, eventually producing an extension to complex numbers (combinations of real numbers and “imaginary” units that involve the square root of negative one) that is known as quaternions. [...]

Andrey Kolmogorov was born in Russia in 1903 and was a mathematician who made contributions to the fields of probability, topology, turbulence, and complexity. He contributed over 300 hundred papers in most areas of mathematics and also supported creating special schools for gifted students. In 1933, Kolmogorov established a set of axioms that he considered [...]

Ars Magna (The Great Art) published in 1545 by Girolamo Cardano, included techniques for solving cubic (to the third power) and quartic (to the fourth power) equations. The solution for cubic equations was developed by Scipione del Ferro, then passed on to a student who provoked Niccolo Fontana (aka Tartaglia) to also develop the solution. [...]

Calculus was developed as a way to calculate areas and volumes of shapes that are not easy to figure using simple math. Differential calculus studies the derivative, which calculates the slope of a line tangent to the function. The slope of the line shows the rate of change in the line. If the line represents [...]

Eudoxus was born around -0408 in Cnidus (now in Turkey) as a Greek and was a mathematician and an astronomer. He learned mathematics from Archytas, astronomy in Egypt, philosophy from Plato and was a teacher to Aristotle. Eudoxus created the first concept of spherical astronomy and planetary motion. He worked on the theory of proportion, [...]

Christiaan Huygens was born in 1629 in The Hague, Netherlands (then known as the Dutch Republic) and was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist. He advanced the art of grinding lenses and building telescopes and in 1655 discovered that Titan was a moon of Saturn and in the next year became the first to propose that [...]

Alan Turing was born in London, England in 1912 and was a mathematician and one of the first computer scientists. He did work on probability theory, number theory and cryptography, but is best known for creating the concept of a computer, which became called, the “Turing Machine”. While Babbage had designed a mechanical “analytical engine”, [...]

The Riemann hypothesis is named after Bernhard Riemann, who worked on a technique to predict the distribution of prime numbers. Mersenne and Fermat worked on formulas that can predict *some* prime numbers but not all of them. In 1737 Euler followed up on their work, eventually showing that the summation series of the reciprocals of [...]

John von Neumann was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1903 and was a mathematician. He did work with logic, set theory, quantum theory and statistical mechanics. His work on fixed point theorems led others to later accumulate three Nobel prizes in the area. He was an expert in explosion hydrodynamics and worked on the “Manhattan [...]

George Boole was born in Lincoln, England in 1815 and was a mathematician. He is most known for his work reducing logic to a form of algebra. In 1854, Boole’s book on logic, “An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities” was published. This created [...]