Math. It's one of those things that most people either love or hate. Those who fall on the hate side of things might still have nightmares of showing up for a high school math test unprepared, even years after graduation. Math is, by nature, an abstract subject, and it can be hard to wrap your head around it if you don't have a good teacher to guide you.
But even if you don't count yourself a fan of mathematics, it's hard to argue that it hasn't been a vital factor in our rapid evolution as a society. We reached the moon because of math. Math allowed us to tease out the secrets of DNA, create and transmit electricity over hundreds of miles to power our homes and offices, and gave rise to computers and all that they do for the world. Without math, we'd still be living in caves getting eaten by cave tigers.
Our history is rich with mathematicians who helped advance our collective understanding of math, but there are a few standouts whose brilliant work and intuitions pushed things in huge leaps and bounds. Their thoughts and discoveries continue to echo through the ages, reverberating today in our cellphones, satellites, hula hoops and automobiles. We picked five of the most brilliant mathematicians whose work continues to help shape our modern world, sometimes hundreds of years after their death. Enjoy!
Carl Gauss (1777-1855)
Isaac Newton is a hard act to follow, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Carl Gauss. If Newton is considered the greatest scientist of all time, Gauss could easily be called the greatest mathematician ever. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born to a poor family in Germany in 1777 and quickly showed himself to be a brilliant mathematician. He published "Arithmetical Investigations," a foundational textbook that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole numbers). Without number theory, you could kiss computers goodbye. Computers operate, on a the most basic level, using just two digits — 1 and 0, and many of the advancements that we've made in using computers to solve problems are solved using number theory. Gauss was prolific, and his work on number theory was just a small part of his contribution to math; you can find his influence throughout algebra, statistics, geometry, optics, astronomy and many other subjects that underlie our modern world.
John von Neumann (1903-1957)
John von Neumann was born János Neumann in Budapest a few years after the start of the 20th century, a well-timed birth for all of us, for he went on to design the architecture underlying nearly every single computer built on the planet today. Right now, whatever device or computer that you are reading this on, be it phone or computer, is cycling through a series of basic steps billions of times over each second; steps that allow it to do things like render Internet articles and play videos and music, steps that were first thought up by John von Neumann.
Von Neumann received his Ph.D in mathematics at the age of 22 while also earning a degree in chemical engineering to appease his father, who was keen on his son having a good marketable skill. Thankfully for all of us, he stuck with math. In 1930, he went to work at Princeton University with Albert Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Study. Before his death in 1957, von Neumann made important discoveries in set theory, geometry, quantum mechanics, game theory, statistics, computer science and was a vital member of the Manhattan Project.
Reference:Wikipedia
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