HackingTheUniverse

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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 [...]

Charles Babbage was born in London, England, in 1791 and was a mathematician and inventor who is mostly known for designing the first calculating machine, that he called a “difference engine”. Babbage had the idea that tables of logarithms “might be calculated by machinery”, which would save time and reduce errors. He went on to [...]

Claude Elwood Shannon was born in 1916 in Michigan, USA and was a mathematician, cryptographer and engineer who become known as “the Father of information theory”. He used Boolean algebra to create the concept of digital logic which most modern electronics are based upon. He did work on the foundations of modern cryptography and designed [...]

While the Egyptians and Babylonians laid foundations for trigonometry, it was the Greeks (Hipparchus) who produced the first known table of trigonometric values. Aristarchus was one of the first to measure angles. -1900 – pi -0300 – “Elements” – Euclid -0310 – Aristarchus -0150 – trigonometric chord tables – Hipparchus 0150 – “Almagest” – Ptolemy [...]

Hipparchus was born around -0190 in Nicea, Greece, which is now part of Turkey. He was a mathematician and an accomplished astronomer who has generally been credited with observing and measuring the precession of the equinoxes, which is a small shift in the apparent position of stars that is caused by a wobble in the [...]

Adrien-Marie Legendre was born in 1752 in Paris, France and was a mathematician. He studied ellipsoids, worked on elliptical functions and published papers on the integration of elliptical arcs, laying the groundwork for Jacobi and Abel. Legendre and Gauss independently developed the prime number theorem. He contributed to geometry by rewriting and simplifying Euclid’s “Elements”. [...]

Pierre-Simon Laplace was born in France in 1749 and was a mathematician and astronomer. His greatest work was a five volume set called, “Celestial Mechanics” which he wrote over a twenty six year period from 1799 to 1825. In addition to summarizing the state of astronomy at the time, he transformed Newton’s geometrical mechanics to [...]

Oliver Heaviside was born in London in 1850 and was a mathematician and electrical engineer. He started out as a telegraph operator then began publishing research papers on telegraphy and made contributions to the electromagnetic principles involved in telegraph line transmission. He adapted Maxwell’s equations to create a pair of linear differential equations that describe [...]

Group theory is about groups of objects that have similar characteristics. Objects can show different kinds of symmetry when they are transformed by a standard set of operations. A basic transformation operation is turning (called rotation in the world of symmetry). When an object is rotated, depending upon the shape of the object and the [...]