Branches of Mathematics

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• Dynamical systems and differential equations
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• 
  

• 
  Abraham Robinson
  Abraham Robinson (born Robinsohn; October 6, 1918 – April 11, 1974) was a mathematician who is most widely known for development of non-standard analysis, a mathematically rigorous system whereby infinitesimal and infinite numbers were incorporated into mathematics.
  He was born to a Jewish family with strong Zionist beliefs, in Waldenburg, Germany, which is now Wałbrzych, in Poland. In 1933, he emigrated to British Mandate of Palestine, where he earned a first degree from the Hebrew University. Robinson was in France when the Nazis invaded during World War II, and escaped by train and on foot, being alternately questioned by French soldiers suspicious of his German passport and asked by them to share his map, which was more detailed than theirs. While in London, he joined the Free French Air Force and contributed to the war effort by teaching himself aerodynamics and becoming an expert on the airfoils used in the wings of fighter planes.
  After the war, Robinson worked in London, Toronto, and Jerusalem, but ended up at University of California, Los Angeles in 1962.
  
  wn.com/Abraham_Robinson
• 
  Albert Einstein
  Albert Einstein ( /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
  Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Einstein
• 
  André Weil
  André Weil (6 May 1906 – 6 August 1998) (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃dʁe vɛj]) was an influential mathematician of the 20th century, renowned for the breadth and quality of his research output, its influence on future work, and the elegance of his exposition. He is especially known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was a founding member and the de facto early leader of the influential Bourbaki group. The philosopher Simone Weil was his sister.
  He was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. His only sibling was Simone Weil, a famous philosopher. Weil studied in Paris, Rome and Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1928. While in Germany, he befriended Carl Ludwig Siegel. He spent two academic years at Aligarh Muslim University from 1930. Hinduism and Sanskrit literature were his life-long interests^{[citation needed]}. After one year in Marseille, he taught six years in Strasbourg. He married Éveline in 1937.
  
  wn.com/André_Weil
• 
  Archimedes
  Archimedes of Syracuse (Ancient Greek: Ἀρχιμήδης; c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Among his advances in physics are the foundations of hydrostatics, statics and an explanation of the principle of the lever. He is credited with designing innovative machines, including siege engines and the screw pump that bears his name. Modern experiments have tested claims that Archimedes designed machines capable of lifting attacking ships out of the water and setting ships on fire using an array of mirrors.
  Archimedes is generally considered to be the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time. He used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave a remarkably accurate approximation of pi. He also defined the spiral bearing his name, formulae for the volumes of surfaces of revolution and an ingenious system for expressing very large numbers.
  
  wn.com/Archimedes
• 
  Bernhard Riemann
  Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann [ˈʁiːman] ( listen) (September 17, 1826 – July 20, 1866) was an influential German mathematician who made lasting contributions to analysis, number theory and differential geometry, some of them enabling the later development of general relativity.
  Riemann was born in Breselenz, a village near Dannenberg in the Kingdom of Hanover in what is the Federal Republic of Germany today. His father, Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, was a poor Lutheran pastor in Breselenz who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. His mother, Charlotte Ebell, died before her children had reached adulthood. Riemann was the second of six children, shy, and suffered from numerous nervous breakdowns. Riemann exhibited exceptional mathematical skills, such as fantastic calculation abilities, from an early age but suffered from timidity and a fear of speaking in public.
  During 1840, Riemann went to Hanover to live with his grandmother and attend lyceum (middle school). After the death of his grandmother in 1842, he attended high school at the Johanneum Lüneburg. In high school, Riemann studied the Bible intensively, but he was often distracted by mathematics. His teachers were amazed by his adept ability to solve complicated mathematical operations, in which he often outstripped his instructor's knowledge. In 1846, at the age of 19, he started studying philology and theology in order to become a priest and help with his family's finances.
  
  wn.com/Bernhard_Riemann
• Carl Benjamin Boyer
  Carl Benjamin Boyer (November 3, 1906 – April 26, 1976) was a historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". He wrote the books History of Analytic Geometry, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development, A History of Mathematics, and The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics. He served as book-review editor of Scripta Mathematica.
  Boyer was valedictorian of his high school class. He received an A.B. from Columbia College in 1928 and an M.A. in 1929. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Columbia University in 1939.
  He was a full professor of Mathematics at Brooklyn College from 1952 until his death, although he had begun tutoring and teaching at Brooklyn College in 1928.
  Boyer was instrumental as an inspiration to the founding of The Metropolitan New York Section of the History of Science Society.
  He was a 1954 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in History of Science & Technology.
  He died of a heart attack in New York in 1976.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Benjamin_Boyer
• 
  Colin Maclaurin
  Colin Maclaurin (February 1698 – 14 June 1746) was a Scottish mathematician who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. The Maclaurin series, a special case of the Taylor series, are named after him.
  Owing to changes in orthography since that time (his name was originally rendered as e.g. "M'Laurine"), his surname is alternatively written MacLaurin. In Gaelic the name is "Cailean MacLabhruinn", which is literally 'Colin, the son of Laurence.'
  Maclaurin was born in Kilmodan, Argyll. His father, Reverend and Minister of Glendaruel John Maclaurin, died when Maclaurin was in infancy, and his mother died before he reached nine years of age. He was then educated under the care of his uncle, the Reverend Daniel Maclaurin, minister of Kilfinnan.
  At eleven, Maclaurin entered the University of Glasgow. He graduated MA three years later by defending a thesis on the Power of Gravity, and remained at Glasgow to study divinity until he was 19, when he was elected professor of mathematics in a ten-day competition at the Marischal College in the University of Aberdeen. He would hold the record as the world's youngest professor until March 2008, when the record was officially given to Alia Sabur.
  
  wn.com/Colin_Maclaurin
• 
  Diophantus
  Diophantus of Alexandria (Ancient Greek: Διόφαντος ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς. b. between A.D. 200 and 214, d. between 284 and 298 at age 84), sometimes called "the father of algebra", was an Alexandrian Greek mathematician and the author of a series of books called Arithmetica. These texts deal with solving algebraic equations, many of which are now lost. In studying Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat concluded that a certain equation considered by Diophantus had no solutions, and noted without elaboration that he had found "a truly marvelous proof of this proposition," now referred to as Fermat's Last Theorem. This led to tremendous advances in number theory, and the study of Diophantine equations ("Diophantine geometry") and of Diophantine approximations remain important areas of mathematical research. Diophantus was the first Greek mathematician who recognized fractions as numbers; thus he allowed positive rational numbers for the coefficients and solutions. In modern use, Diophantine equations are usually algebraic equations with integer coefficients, for which integer solutions are sought. Diophantus also made advances in mathematical notation.
  
  wn.com/Diophantus
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  Edmund Landau
  Edmund Georg Hermann Landau (14 February 1877 – 19 February 1938) was a German Jewish mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis.
  Edmund Landau was born in Berlin to a wealthy Jewish family. His father was Leopold Landau, a gynecologist. His mother was Johanna Jacoby from the well known German Jewish Jacoby banking family. Landau studied mathematics at the University of Berlin and received his doctorate in 1899 and his habilitation (the post-doctoral qualification required in German universities) in 1901. His doctoral thesis was 14 pages long. In 1905 he married Marianne Ehrlich, the daughter of the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
  
  wn.com/Edmund_Landau
• Eric W. Weisstein
  Eric Wolfgang Weisstein (born March 18, 1969, in Bloomington, Indiana) is an encyclopedist who created and maintains MathWorld and Eric Weisstein's World of Science (ScienceWorld). He currently works for Wolfram Research, Inc.
  Weisstein holds a Ph.D. in planetary astronomy which he obtained from the California Institute of Technology's (Caltech) Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences in 1996 as well as an M.S. in planetary astronomy in 1993 also from Caltech. Weisstein graduated Cum Laude from Cornell University with a B.A. in physics and a minor in astronomy in 1990. During his summers away from Cornell, Weisstein participated in research at the Arecibo Observatory, a radio telescope facility in Puerto Rico operated by Cornell. As a graduate student, Weisstein also participated in research at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. During his time at Goddard, Weisstein participated in the development of hurricane visualization software. In 1996 Weisstein published his doctoral thesis titled Millimeter/Submillimeter Fourier Transform Spectroscopy of Jovian Planet Atmospheres which was completed under faculty advisor Dewey Muhleman and in association with Eugene Serabyn, who is now a member of the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
  
  wn.com/Eric_W._Weisstein
• Eudoxus of Cnidus
  Eudoxus of Cnidus (410 or 408 BC – 355 or 347 BC) was a Greek astronomer, mathematician, scholar and student of Plato. Since all his own works are lost, knowledge of him is obtained from secondary sources, such as Aratus's poem on astronomy. Theodosius of Bithynia's Sphaerics may be based on a work of Eudoxus.
  His name Eudoxus means "honored" or "of good repute" (in Greek Εὔδοξος, from eu "good" and doxa "opinion, belief, fame"). It is analogous to the Latin name Benedictus.
  Eudoxus's father Aeschines of Cnidus loved to watch stars at night. Eudoxus first travelled to Tarentum to study with Archytas, from whom he learned mathematics. While in Italy, Eudoxus visited Sicily, where he studied medicine with Philiston.
  Around 387 BC, at the age of 23, he traveled with the physician Theomedon, who according to Diogenes Laërtius some believed was his lover, to Athens to study with the followers of Socrates. He eventually became the pupil of Plato, with whom he studied for several months, but due to a disagreement they had a falling out. Eudoxus was quite poor and could only afford an apartment at the Piraeus. To attend Plato's lectures, he walked the seven miles (11 km) each direction, each day. Due to his poverty, his friends raised funds sufficient to send him to Heliopolis, Egypt to pursue his study of astronomy and mathematics. He lived there for 16 months. From Egypt, he then traveled north to Cyzicus, located on the south shore of the Sea of Marmara, the Propontis. He traveled south to the court of Mausolus. During his travels he gathered many students of his own.
  
  wn.com/Eudoxus_of_Cnidus
• 
  Florian Cajori
  Florian Cajori (St Aignan, Switzerland, February 28, 1859 – August 14 or 15, 1930,Berkeley, United States) was one of the most celebrated historians of mathematics in his day.
  Florian Cajori emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. He received a Ph.D. at Tulane University, where he taught for a few years before being driven north by his health. He taught at Colorado College, where he founded the Colorado College Scientific Society. Even today his History of Mathematical Notations (1928–29) has been described as "unsurpassed." In 1918, he was appointed to a specially created chair in history of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained in Berkeley, California until his death in 1930.
  His last work was revising Motte's Translation of Newton's Principia, vol.1 The Motion of Bodies, but he died before it was finished. The work was finished by R.T.Crawford of Berkeley, California.
  The Cajori crater on the Moon was named in his honour.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Florian_Cajori
• George B. Thomas
  George Brinton Thomas, Jr. (January 11, 1914 – October 31, 2006) was a professor of mathematics at MIT. He is best known for being the author of a widely-used calculus textbook.
  Born in Boise, Idaho, Thomas' early years were difficult. His father, George Brinton Thomas Sr., was a bank employee, and his mother, Georgia Fay Thomas (née Goin), died in the 1919 Influenza Epidemic, just eight days before his fifth birthday. His father remarried shortly thereafter, to Lena Steward. They lived in a tent with a wooden floor and a coal stove.
  After his stepmother Lena died from complications due to childbirth, the father and son moved to the Spokane Valley in Washington State, where they both attended Spokane University. George Thomas Sr. married again, to Mary Gertrude Johnson. Thomas began attending Washington State College (now Washington State University), after Spokane University went bankrupt. There, he earned a B.A. in 1934 and an M.A. in 1936, both in mathematics and mathematics education.
  
  wn.com/George_B._Thomas
• 
  George Berkeley
  George Berkeley ( /ˈbɑrkliː/; 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Thus, as Berkeley famously put it, for physical objects "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
  In 1709, Berkeley published his first major work, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he discussed the limitations of human vision and advanced the theory that the proper objects of sight are not material objects, but light and color. This foreshadowed his chief philosophical work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 which, after its poor reception, he rewrote in dialogue form and published under the title Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in 1713.
  In this book, Berkeley's views were represented by Philonous (Greek: 'lover of mind'), while Hylas (Greek: 'matter') embodies the Irish thinker’s opponents, in particular John Locke. Berkeley argued against Sir Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu (on Motion), published 1721. His arguments were a precursor to the views of Mach and Einstein. In 1732, he published Alciphron, a Christian apologetic against the free-thinkers, and in 1734, he published The Analyst, an empiricist critique of the foundations of infinitesimal calculus, which was influential in the development of mathematics.
  
  wn.com/George_Berkeley
• 
  Gottfried Leibniz
  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (sometimes von Leibniz) (German pronunciation: [ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈvɪlhɛlm fɔn ˈlaɪbnɪts] or [ˈlaɪpnɪts]) (July 1, 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher. He wrote in several languages, but primarily in Latin (~40%), French (~30%) and German (~15%).
  
  wn.com/Gottfried_Leibniz
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  Henri Lebesgue
  Henri Léon Lebesgue FRS (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi leɔ̃ ləbɛɡ]; June 28, 1875 – July 26, 1941) was a French mathematician most famous for his theory of integration, which was a generalization of the 17th century concept of integration—summing the area between an axis and the curve of a function defined for that axis. His theory was published originally in his dissertation Intégrale, longueur, aire ("Integral, length, area") at the University of Nancy during 1902.
  Henry Lebesgue was born on 28 June 1875 in Beauvais, Oise. Lebesgue's father was a typesetter and his mother was a school teacher. His parents assembled at home a library that the young Henri was able to use. Unfortunately his father died of tuberculosis when Lebesgue was still very young and his mother had to support him by herself. As he showed a remarkable talent for mathematics in primary school, one of his instructors arranged for community support to continue his education at the Collège de Beauvais and then at Lycée Saint-Louis and Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris.
  
  wn.com/Henri_Lebesgue
• 
  Isaac Barrow
  Isaac Barrow (October 1630 – 4 May 1677) was an English Christian theologian, and mathematician who is generally given credit for his early role in the development of infinitesimal calculus; in particular, for the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus. His work centered on the properties of the tangent; Barrow was the first to calculate the tangents of the kappa curve. Isaac Newton was a student of Barrow's, and Newton went on to develop calculus in a modern form. The lunar crater Barrow is named after him.
  Barrow was born in London. He was the son of Thomas Barrow, a linen draper by trade. Thomas married Ann, daughter of William Buggin of North Cray, Kent in 1624 and their son Isaac was born in 1630. Ann died in 1634 and Thomas sent Isaac to live with his grandfather. He went to school first at Charterhouse (where he was so turbulent and pugnacious that his father was heard to pray that if it pleased God to take any of his children he could best spare Isaac), and subsequently to Felsted School, where he settled and learned under the brilliant puritan Headmaster Martin Holbeach who ten years previously had educated John Wallis. Having learnt Greek, Hebrew, Latin and logic at Felsted, in preparation for university studies, he continued his education at Trinity College, Cambridge; his uncle and namesake, afterwards Bishop of St Asaph, was a Fellow of Peterhouse. He took to hard study, distinguishing himself in classics and mathematics; after taking his degree in 1648, he was elected to a fellowship in 1649. Barrow received an MA from Cambridge in 1652 as a student of James Duport; he then resided for a few years in college, and became candidate for the Greek Professorship at Cambridge, but in 1655 he was driven out by the persecution of the Independents. He spent the next four years travelling across France, Italy and even Constantinople, and after many adventures returned to England in 1659.
  
  wn.com/Isaac_Barrow
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  Isaac Newton
  Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
  
  wn.com/Isaac_Newton
• John Lane Bell
  John Bell (b. March 25, 1945) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. He is an outstanding figure in mathematical logic and philosophy. His research covers a wide spectrum, and includes such topics as set theory, model theory, lattice theory, modal logic, quantum logic,constructive mathematics, type theory, topos theory, infinitesimal analysis, spacetime theory, and the philosophy of mathematics. He is the author of more than 70 articles and of 10 books, several of which have become to be regarded as classics in their fields. In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
  He was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University at the age of 15, and graduated with a D.Phil. in Mathematics: his dissertation supervisor was John Crossley. During the period 1968-89 he was a Lecturer in Mathematics, and later Reader in Mathematical Logic at the London School of Economics.
  John Bell's students include Graham Priest (Ph.D. Mathematics LSE, 1972), Michael Hallett (Ph.D. Philosophy LSE, 1979), Elaine Landry (Ph.D. Philosophy UWO, 1997) and David DeVidi (Ph.D. Philosophy UWO, 1994).
  
  wn.com/John_Lane_Bell
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  John von Neumann
  John von Neumann ( /vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics, linear programming, game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics, and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history. The mathematician Jean Dieudonné called von Neumann "the last of the great mathematicians", while Peter Lax described him as possessing the most "fearsome technical prowess" and "scintillating intellect" of the century, and Hans Bethe stated "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man". Even in Budapest, in the time that produced geniuses like Theodore von Kármán (b. 1881), George de Hevesy (b. 1885), Leó Szilárd (b. 1898), Eugene Wigner (b. 1902), Edward Teller (b. 1908), and Paul Erdős (b. 1913), his brilliance stood out.
  
  wn.com/John_von_Neumann
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  John Wallis
  John Wallis (23 November 1616 – 28 October 1703) was an English mathematician who is given partial credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is also credited with introducing the symbol Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): {\infty}
  John Brehaut Wallis was born in Ashford, Kent, the third of five children of Reverend John Wallis and Joanna Chapman. He was initially educated at a local Ashford school, but moved to James Movat's school in Tenterden in 1625 following an outbreak of plague. Wallis was first exposed to mathematics in 1631, at Martin Holbeach's school in Felsted; he enjoyed maths, but his study was erratic, since: "mathematics, at that time with us, were scarce looked on as academical studies, but rather mechanical" (Scriba 1970).
  As it was intended that he should be a doctor, he was sent in 1632 to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. While there, he kept an act on the doctrine of the circulation of the blood; that was said to have been the first occasion in Europe on which this theory was publicly maintained in a disputation. His interests, however, centred on mathematics. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1637, and a Master's in 1640, afterwards entering the priesthood. From 1643–49, he served as a non-voting scribe at the Westminster Assembly. Wallis was elected to a fellowship at Queens' College, Cambridge in 1644, which he however had to resign following his marriage.
  
  wn.com/John_Wallis
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  Karl Weierstrass
  Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass (German: Weierstraß; 31 October 1815 – 19 February 1897) was a German mathematician who is often cited as the "father of modern analysis".
  Weierstrass was born in Ostenfelde, part of Ennigerloh, Province of Westphalia.
  Weierstrass was the son of Wilhelm Weierstrass, a government official, and Theodora Vonderforst. His interest in mathematics began while he was a Gymnasium student at Theodorianum in Paderborn. He was sent to the University of Bonn upon graduation to prepare for a government position. Because his studies were to be in the fields of law, economics, and finance, he was immediately in conflict with his hopes to study mathematics. He resolved the conflict by paying little heed to his planned course of study, but continued private study in mathematics. The outcome was to leave the university without a degree. After that he studied mathematics at the University of Münster (which was even at this time very famous for mathematics) and his father was able to obtain a place for him in a teacher training school in Münster. Later he was certified as a teacher in that city. During this period of study, Weierstrass attended the lectures of Christoph Gudermann and became interested in elliptic functions. In 1843 he taught in Deutsch-Krone in Westprussia and since 1848 he taught at the Lyceum Hosianum in Braunsberg. Besides mathematics he also taught physics, botanics and gymnastics.
  
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  Laurent Schwartz
  Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (5 March 1915 in Paris – 4 July 2002 in Paris) was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields medal in 1950 for his work. For a long time he taught at the École polytechnique.
  Apart from his scientific work, he was a well-known outspoken intellectual, leaning towards socialism.
  Laurent Schwartz comes from a Jewish family of Alsatian origin, with a strong scientific background: his father is a well-known surgeon, his uncle Robert Debré (who contributed to the creation of UNICEF) is a famous pediatrician, and his great-uncle-in-law, Jacques Hadamard, is a famous mathematician.
  During his training at Lycée Louis-le-Grand to enter the École Normale Supérieure, he fell in love with Marie-Hélène Lévy, daughter of the probabilist Paul Lévy who was then teaching at the École polytechnique. Later they would have two children, Marc-André and Claudine. Marie-Hélène was gifted in mathematics as well, as she contributed to the geometry of singular analytic spaces and taught at the University of Lille.
  
  wn.com/Laurent_Schwartz
• Liu Hui
  Liu Hui (fl. 3rd century) was a mathematician of the state of Cao Wei during the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. In 263, he edited and published a book with solutions to mathematical problems presented in the famous Chinese book of mathematics known as The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art (九章算术).
  He was a descendant of the Marquis of Zixiang of the Han dynasty, corresponding to current Zixiang township of Shandong province. He completed his commentary to the Nine Chapters in the year 263.
  He probably visited Luoyang, and measured the sun's shadow.
  Along with Zu Chongzhi, Liu Hui was known as one of the greatest mathematicians of ancient China. Liu Hui expressed all of his mathematical results in the form of decimal fractions (using metrological units), yet the later Yang Hui (c. 1238-1298 AD) expressed his mathematical results in full decimal expressions.
  Liu provided commentary on a mathematical proof identical to the Pythagorean theorem. Liu called the figure of the drawn diagram for the theorem the "diagram giving the relations between the hypotenuse and the sum and difference of the other two sides whereby one can find the unknown from the known".
  
  wn.com/Liu_Hui
• 
  Maria Gaetana Agnesi
  Maria Gaetana Agnesi (May 16, 1718 – January 9, 1799) was an Italian linguist, mathematician, and philosopher. Agnesi is credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus. She was an honorary member of the faculty at the University of Bologna. According to Dirk Jan Struik, Agnesi is "the first important woman mathematician since Hypatia (fifth century A.D.)".
  Her sister was Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini, a pianist and composer.
  Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan on May 16, 1718, to a wealthy and literate family. Her father wanted to elevate his family into the Milanese nobility. In order to achieve his goal, he had married in 1717 Anna Fortunata Brivio. Her mother's death provided her the excuse to retire from public life. She took over management of the household.
  
  wn.com/Maria_Gaetana_Agnesi
• 
  Martin Gardner
  Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll and G.K. Chesterton), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981 and the Notes of a Fringe-Watcher column in Skeptical Inquirer from 1983 to 2002 and published almost 100 books.
  I just play all the time and am fortunate enough to get paid for it.
  Gardner, son of a petroleum geologist, grew up in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma. He showed an early interest in puzzles and games and his closest childhood friend, John Bennett Shaw, later became "the greatest of all collectors of Sherlockian memorabilia". He attended the University of Chicago (UC) where he earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936. Early jobs included reporter on the Tulsa Tribune, writer at the UC Office of Press Relations and case worker in Chicago's Black Belt for the city's Relief Administration. During World War II, he served for several years in the U.S. Navy as a yeoman on board the destroyer escort USS Pope (DE-134) in the Atlantic. His ship was still in the Atlantic when the war came to an end with the surrender of Japan in August 1945.
  
  wn.com/Martin_Gardner
• Michael Spivak
  Michael David Spivak (born 1940 in Queens, New York) is a mathematician specializing in differential geometry, an expositor of mathematics, and the founder of Publish-or-Perish Press. He is the author of the five-volume A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University under the supervision of John Milnor in 1964 .
  His book Calculus takes a very rigorous and theoretical approach to introductory calculus^{[according to whom?]}. It is used in calculus courses, particularly those with a pure mathematics emphasis, at many universities^{[citation needed]}.
  Spivak has also written The Joy of TeX: A Gourmet Guide to Typesetting With the AMS-TeX Macro Package and The Hitchhiker's Guide to Calculus. The famous book Morse Theory, by John Milnor, was based on lecture notes by Spivak and Robert Wells^{[citation needed]}. Spivak's book Calculus on Manifolds (often referred to as little Spivak) is also rather infamous as being one of the most difficult undergraduate mathematics textbooks^{[according to whom?]}.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Spivak
• Mikhail Katz
  Mikhail Katz (born 1958) is an Israeli mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Bar-Ilan University. His main interests are differential geometry and geometric topology; he is the author of a book about systolic geometry.
  Katz earned a bachelor's degree in 1980 from Harvard University. He did his graduate studies at Columbia University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1984 under the joint supervision of Troels Jørgensen and Mikhael Gromov. He moved to Bar-Ilan University in 1999, after previously holding positions at the University of Maryland, College Park, Stony Brook University, Indiana University Bloomington, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, the University of Rennes 1, Henri Poincaré University, and Tel Aviv University.
  Katz has performed research in systolic geometry in collaboration with Luigi Ambrosio, Victor Bangert, Mikhail Gromov, Steve Shnider, Shmuel Weinberger, and others. He has authored research publications appearing in leading journals including Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Duke Mathematical Journal, Geometric and Functional Analysis, and Journal of Differential Geometry. Along with these papers, Katz was a contributor to the book "Metric Structures for Riemannian and Non-Riemannian Spaces".Marcel Berger in his article "What is... a Systole?" lists the book (Katz, 2007) as one of two books he cites in systolic geometry.
  
  wn.com/Mikhail_Katz
• OpenCourseWare
  OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the Internet.
  The movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online in the context of its timms initiative. The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT in October 2002. The movement has been reinforced by the launch of similar projects at Yale, Michigan University, and the University of California Berkeley. MIT's reasoning behind OCW was to "enhance human learning worldwide by the availability of a web of knowledge." MIT also believes that it would allow students to become better prepared for classes so that they may be more engaged during a class. Since then, a number of universities have created OCW projects modeled after MIT's, some of which have been funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
  According to the website of the OCW Consortium, an OCW project:
  This listing is roughly in the order of adoption of OCW principles.
  
  wn.com/OpenCourseWare
• 
  Pierre de Fermat
  Pierre de Fermat (French pronunciation: [pjɛːʁ dəfɛʁˈma]; 17 August 1601 or 1607/8 – 12 January 1665) was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and an amateur mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of the then unknown differential calculus, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for Fermat's Last Theorem, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica.
  Fermat was born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, Tarn-et-Garonne, France; the late 15th century mansion where Fermat was born is now a museum. He was of Basque origin. Fermat's father was a wealthy leather merchant and second consul of Beaumont-de-Lomagne. Pierre had a brother and two sisters and was almost certainly brought up in the town of his birth. There is little evidence concerning his school education, but it may have been at the local Franciscan monastery.
  
  wn.com/Pierre_de_Fermat
• 
  Richard Courant
  Richard Courant (January 8, 1888 – January 27, 1972) was a German American mathematician.
  Courant was born in Lublinitz in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. During his youth, his parents had to move quite often, to Glatz, Breslau, and in 1905 to Berlin. He stayed in Breslau and entered the university there. As he found the courses not demanding enough, he continued his studies in Zürich and Göttingen. Courant eventually became David Hilbert's assistant in Göttingen and obtained his doctorate there in 1910. He had to fight in World War I, but he was wounded and dismissed from the military service shortly after enlisting. After the war, in 1919, he married Nerina (Nina) Runge, a daughter of the Göttingen professor for Applied Mathematics, Carl Runge. Richard continued his research in Göttingen, with a two-year period as professor in Münster. There he founded the Mathematical Institute, which he headed as director from 1928 until 1933.
  Courant left Germany in 1933, earlier than many of his colleagues. While he was classified as a Jew by the Nazis, his having served as a front-line soldier exempted him from losing his position for this particular reason at the time; however, his public membership in the social-democratic left was a reason for dismissal to which no such exemption applied.[1]
  
  wn.com/Richard_Courant
• 
  Silvanus P. Thompson
  Silvanus Phillips Thompson FRS (19 June 1851 – 12 June 1916) was a professor of physics at the City and Guilds Technical College in Finsbury, England. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1891 and was known for his work as an electrical engineer and as an author. Thompson's most enduring publication is his 1910 text Calculus Made Easy, which teaches the fundamentals of calculus, and is still in print. Thompson also wrote a popular physics text, Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism, as well as biographies of Lord Kelvin and Michael Faraday.
  Silvanus Thompson was born in the year of the Great Exhibition of 1851 to a Quaker family in York, England. His father served as a master at the Quaker Bootham School in York and he also studied there. In 1873 Silvanus Thompson was made the science master at the school.
  On 11 February 1876 he heard Sir William Crookes give an evening discourse at the Royal Institution on The Mechanical Action of Light when Crookes demonstrated his light mill or radiometer. Thompson was intrigued and stimulated and developed a major interest in light and optics (his other main interest being electromagnetism). In 1876 he was appointed as a lecturer in Physics at University College, Bristol, and later was made Professor in 1878 at the age of 27.
  
  wn.com/Silvanus_P._Thompson
• Tom M. Apostol
  Tom Mike Apostol (born 1923) is a Greek-American analytic number theorist and professor at the California Institute of Technology.
  He was born in Helper, Utah in 1923. His parents, Emmanouil Apostolopoulos and Efrosini Papathanasopoulos, originated from Greece. Mr. Apostolopoulos's name was shortened to Mike Apostol when he obtained his United States citizenship, and Tom Apostol inherited this Americanized surname.
  Apostol received his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering, Master's degree in mathematics from the University of Washington, and a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1948. Apostol has since been a faculty member at UC Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech. He is the author of several influential graduate and undergraduate level textbooks.
  He is a well-known teacher. He is the creator and project director for Project MATHEMATICS! producing videos which explore basic topics in high school mathematics. He has helped popularize the visual calculus devised by Mamikon Mnatsakanian with whom he has also written a number of papers, many of which appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly. Apostol also provided academic content for an acclaimed video lecture series on introductory physics, The Mechanical Universe.
  
  wn.com/Tom_M._Apostol
• 
  Zeno of Elea
  Zeno of Elea ( /ˈziːnoʊ əv ˈɛliə/; Greek: Ζήνων ὁ Ἐλεάτης; ca. 490 BC – ca. 430 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic. He is best known for his paradoxes, which Bertrand Russell has described as "immeasurably subtle and profound".
  Little is known for certain about Zeno's life. Although written nearly a century after Zeno's death, the primary source of biographical information about Zeno is Plato's Parmenides dialogue. In the dialogue, Plato describes a visit to Athens by Zeno and Parmenides, at a time when Parmenides is "about 65," Zeno is "nearly 40" and Socrates is "a very young man". Assuming an age for Socrates of around 20, and taking the date of Socrates' birth as 469 BC gives an approximate date of birth for Zeno of 490 BC. Plato says that Zeno was "tall and fair to look upon" and was "in the days of his youth … reported to have been beloved by Parmenides".
  
  wn.com/Zeno_of_Elea
• 
  Zu Chongzhi
  Zu Chongzhi (simplified Chinese: 祖冲之; traditional Chinese: 祖沖之; pinyin: Zǔ Chōngzhī; Wade–Giles: Tsu Ch'ung-chih) (429–500), courtesy name Wenyuan (文遠), was a prominent Chinese mathematician and astronomer during the Liu Song and Southern Qi Dynasties.
  Chongzhi's ancestry was from modern Baoding, Hebei. To flee from the ravage of war, Zu's grandfather Zu Chang moved to the Yangtze, as part of the massive population movement during the Eastern Jin. Zu Chang (祖昌) at one point held the position of "Minister of Great Works" ) within the Liu Song and was in charge of government construction projects. Zu's father, Zu Shuo (祖朔) also served the court and was greatly respected for his erudition.
  Zu was born in Jiankang. His family had historically been involved in astronomy research, and from childhood Zu was exposed to both astronomy and mathematics. When he was only a youth his talent earned him much repute. When Emperor Xiaowu of Liu Song heard of him, he was sent to an Academy, the Hualin Xuesheng (華林學省), and later at the Imperial Nanjing University (Zongmingguan) to perform research. In 461 in Nanxu (today Zhenjiang, Jiangsu), he was engaged in work at the office of the local governor.
  
  wn.com/Zu_Chongzhi

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