The continent of Europe housed some of the most brilliant minds in the world of mathematics. Throughout the continent’s timeline, men and women have come up with astounding contributions or have solved some of the most unsolvable questions in the field of mathematics. Mathematics today is accepted as essential and indispensable for addressing the significant challenges in science, technology, and society
Here are some of the most famous men and women of Europe who contributed extensively to the field of Mathematics.
- Pythagoras (570 BC – 495 BC): was from the island of Samos and a brilliant ancient Greek philosopher. He was the founder of Pythagoreanism and influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them, Western philosophy. Pythagoras’s life was clouded by legend, but it is a fact that in his school students took on oath to secrecy and have to lead a life of an ascetic. It is believed that he devised the doctrine of musica Universalis, which states the planets move according to mathematical equations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. Pythagoras was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher or a lover of wisdom.
2. Ptolemy ( 100 AD to 170 AD): Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria city in the Roman province of Egypt was a Greek mathematician. This Greek philosopher developed the Babylonian observations and Babylonian lunar theory. Ptolemy wrote several scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. His debut astronomical treatise was known as the Almagest. It was initially entitled to the Mathematical Treatise and then known as the Great Treatise. The second treatise was Geography, which is a thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day.
3. Hypatia ( AD 360 – AD 415): Though women’s history was not well recorded and hence usually go unnoticed in mathematics, yet there were always exceptions. Hypatia was a 4th-century scholar. Her most treasured scientific heritage was her edited version of Euclid’s The Elements, the most famous Greek mathematical text. She was also attributed to have constructed the astrolabes and hydrometers. In common terms, it would be an analogue calculator and density measuring equipment.
4. Jehan Adam (1437 AD – 1500 AD): The French mathematician was a secretary to Nicholle Tilhart. He contributed to auditing and accounting and was the first to give the name billions and trillions through his manuscript published in the year 1475.
5. Girolamo Cardano (1501 AD – 1576 AD): The Italian mathematician was proficient in many fields. He was a physician, biologist, chemist, philosopher, and writer, but he was most distinguished as a gambler. He was usually short of money and kept his finances afloat by wagering and playing chess. It gave him the chance to develop his theories in probability and in his book Games of Chance written in the year 1564 but published in 1663, detailed on the systematic treatment of probability. It also has a section on effective cheating methods! He demonstrated his understanding of probability through the game of dice and established the effectiveness of defining the odds in the form of a ratio. He suggested to rate all the favorable to unfavorable outcomes and hence the probability of an event would be the ratio of favorable results to the total number of possible outcomes. Cardano seemed to be aware of the multiplication rules for any independent events but was just not sure about weightage values to be multiplied.
6. Georg Cantor ( 1845 – 1918): This German mathematician created the set theory which is now one of the most fundamental theories of mathematics. He also established that there are more real numbers then the natural numbers and showed the arithmetic of ordinal and cardinal numbers.
7. Paul Erdos (1913 – 1996): Paul was a celebrated Hungarian mathematician and an inexhaustible producer of mathematical conjectures and papers. He collaborated with more than 500 contributors to publish around 1,500 mathematical theses during his lifetime. The figure remains incomparable. He was also a firm believer in the social practice of mathematics; hence he embraced a very unconventional lifestyle. He practically devoted all his awake hours in writing mathematical papers with other mathematicians. He died hours after he solved a geometry problem at the Warsaw conference. His work was majorly around discrete mathematics. He answered many previously unsolved questions in the field and always thought towards solving existing mathematical problems rather than develop or explore new ideas in mathematics.
8. Tom M. Apostol (1923-2016): Apostol was born in Utah, and his parents were Greek immigrants. His original name Apostolopoulos was condensed to Mike Apostol on his accepting US citizenship, thereby inheriting the Americanized surname. In the year, 1944 Apostol received his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering, a Master’s degree in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1948. As a faculty member at UC Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech he authored several influential graduate and undergraduate level textbooks. Apostol was the director of Project MATHEMATICS. It produced videos that explored essential topics in high school mathematics. He propagated the visual calculus developed by Mamikon Mnatsakanian and also authored several 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.
9. Mikhail Shubin (1944 – Present): Born in Russia Mikhail is a prominent professor and a renowned Mathematician. He has written more than 140 papers and books, supervised many doctoral theses, and headed multiple committees. His area of contributions are in convolution equations, pseudo-difference operators and their Green function, holomorphic families of subspaces of Banach spaces, complete asymptotic expansion of spectral invariants, Lefschetz-type formulas, factorization of matrix functions, transversally elliptic operators, pseudo-differential operators on Lie groups, the Riemann–Roch theorem for general elliptic operators, non-standard analysis and singular perturbations of ordinary differential equations, elliptic operators on manifolds of bounded geometry, von Neumann algebras, and topology of non-simply connected manifolds, on-linear equations, idempotent analysis, spectra of magnetic Schrödinger operators and geometric theory of lattice vibrations and specific heat.
10. Grigori Perelman (1966 – Present): Grigori is a Russian mathematician. He contributed to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology. He proved the “Soul conjecture” in 1994 and Thurston’s geometrization conjecture in 2003. The mathematician, however, had no love for money or fame. In 2006 he was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal for his insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow he declined stating he did not want to be displayed like an animal in the zoo. Again, in 2010, Grigori rejected the first Clay Millennium Prize for the breakthrough he achieved in Poincaré conjecture.
Throughout history, the European mathematicians have been active and have always raised to the ground-breaking roles in mathematics. Men and Women have equally contributed to existing and emerging mathematical fields.
