# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged mathematicians

89 votes
Accepted

### What famous theorems or results were proven by female mathematicians?

See at least Emmy Noether : was a German mathematician known for her contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean ...
• 13.9k
59 votes

### Examples of when the professional scientists or mathematicians were wrong, but the nonprofessionals were right

It seems ball lightning was disbelieved by scientists until around 1960. See Wikipedia . I knew a geologist who told us how his eye-witness account of ball lightning had been ridiculed. He had ...
• 9,445
52 votes

### Examples of when the professional scientists or mathematicians were wrong, but the nonprofessionals were right

In 1726's Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift mocked the learned scientists of Britain for not having solved the Longitude problem: Figure out a way to keep track of one's east-west location to within ...
• 637
51 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first Iranian and first woman to win the Fields medal, died of breast cancer in July 2017. She was only 40 years of age.
• 785
46 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Évariste Galois (1811 - 1832), aged 20, was killed in a duel. He is known for Galois theory and he wrote his most notable results down in the night before the duel. You can also find more information ...
• 2,882
44 votes

### What famous theorems or results were proven by female mathematicians?

Perhaps because of its youth, the mathematical end of Computer Science has several notable women in its history. Sheila Greibach was a pioneer in the field of formal language theory, particularly in ...
• 611
39 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 - 1920) died at the age of $32$, according to Wikipedia the cause was: A 1994 analysis of Ramanujan's medical records and symptoms by Dr. D.A.B. Young concluded that it ...
• 2,490
36 votes
Accepted

### How was Lagrange appointed professor of mathematics so early?

Lagrange enrolled to the university at the age of 14, to study law. But he quickly switched to mathematics. According to his biography, his mother was surprised when the French ambassador presented ...
• 45.4k
35 votes
Accepted

### Story of a student who solves an open problem

That's John von Neumann, about whom George Pólya wrote: There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I ...
• 5,516
34 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) died at the age of 39. Paraphrasing the following from Wikipedia: The son of a poor pastor, he enrolled at age 19 at the University of Göttingen to obtain a degree in ...
• 818
33 votes

### Examples of when the professional scientists or mathematicians were wrong, but the nonprofessionals were right

This isn't a topic I'm familiar with, just something I've read on Quanta, but according to this article, Richard Kershner of Johns Hopkins claimed to have a complete classification of convex pentagon ...
• 503
33 votes
Accepted

### Is the story about Fermat's writing on a margin true?

Yes, it is true. Fermat's own copy was used in the publication of Diophantus by Fermat's son Samuel, and he included Fermat's notes. The original with Fermat's handwriting is lost. https://www.joh.cam....
• 45.4k
31 votes

### What famous theorems or results were proven by female mathematicians?

There is Sophie Germain's theorem, a theorem in number theory, related to Fermat's last theorem and proved by the French mathematician Sophie Germain (1776-1831).
• 411
30 votes
Accepted

### How did Ramanujan learn to do mathematics?

First hand testimony and insightful thoughts on Ramanujan's background and way of doing mathematics can be found in Hardy's lecture Indian Mathematician Ramanujan. Hardy is the British mathematician ...
• 70.1k
30 votes

### What famous theorems or results were proven by female mathematicians?

There is the work by Ada Lovelace. In the annotations, which were called "Notes", Ada Lovelace described how the analytical engine could be programmed and gave what many consider to be the first ...
• 433
30 votes
Accepted

### What does it mean by "d-ism of Leibniz" and "dotage of Newton" in simple English?

It is a play of words by Charles Babbage. Deism was a religious belief or rather a movement promoting the idea that God exists but it does not interfere with whatever happens in this world. This old ...
• 3,636
28 votes

### Examples of when the professional scientists or mathematicians were wrong, but the nonprofessionals were right

I think a famous example is the Monty Hall problem` https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem about switching doors. The problem was answered correctly by Marilyn vos Savant, but she got ...
• 389
28 votes
Accepted

### Did president Garfield make any contributions to Mathematics?

No. The library of Congress has a well-organized website of Garfield's papers, and he did not publish anything on mathematics other than that one note on the Pythagorean theorem in April 1, 1876 issue ...
• 70.1k
26 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Eugenio Elia Levi (1883-1917), the one of Levi decomposition in Lie algebras, was killed in action during WWI to which he participated as a volunteer. It is often said that his early death played a ...
• 1,647
26 votes
Accepted

### Was Kolmogorov enraged after learning about the Karatsuba multiplication algorithm?

Karatsuba's own report can be found in his 1995 paper Сложность вычислений (Complexity of computations). The phrasing he uses is "сильно взволновалo", which Google does translate as "...
• 70.1k
26 votes
Accepted

### Which mathematician traveled to and moved in with each collaborator?

The man is Paul Erdős. As pointed out by the OP in the comments, his "nomadic" lifestyle is briefly mentioned in the Brown Numbers - Numberphile video, 3.05-3.30. It is also concisely ...
• 70.1k
25 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Yutaka Taniyama was a notable Japanese mathematician known for the Taniyama–Shimura or Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture now referred to as the Modularity theorem which "states that elliptic ...
• 2,006
25 votes

### How were irrational numbers accepted by mathematicians?

Let me clarify a couple of things. No student of Pythagoras discovered irrational numbers, although this is a common misconception, Pythagoreans and even Euclid did not associate numbers with ...
• 70.1k
24 votes

### What famous theorems or results were proven by female mathematicians?

I found an existence theorem for the Cauchy Problem in partial differential equations which has been proven by Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya.
• 2,490
24 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Frank Ramsey died before his 27th birthday. He started Ramsey theory, which is a very active field in mathematics.
• 1,237
24 votes

### Examples of when the professional scientists or mathematicians were wrong, but the nonprofessionals were right

Take meteorites, for instance. By the end of the XVIIIth century, educated people “knew” that no rock found on Earth could possibly have fallen from the sky, in spite of the evidence (...
• 5,516
23 votes
Accepted

### Was Pólya’s “How To Solve It” originally written in German or English (or some other language)?

How To Solve It was originally published in English in 1945 by Princeton University Press in English, after being rejected by three other U.S. publishers. However, the original text at least started ...
• 2,742
23 votes

### Which mathematicians died very young or in a tragic way?

Mikhail Yakovlevich Suslin (1894-1919). Known for "Suslin sets" and the "Suslin hypothesis". He died of typhus following the Russian Revolution. He was 25. LINK I recently read a very interesting ...
• 9,445
23 votes
Accepted

### Who was Heinrich Kornblum?

The Göttingen Digitalization Center provides a digital scan of the paper H. Kornblum: "Über die Primfunktionen in einer arithmetischen Progression." Mathematische Zeitschrift 5 (1919), 100–111 online. ...
• 4,431

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible