Who’s your favorite mathematician?
Besides Richard Green, I would say Joseph Fourier or Johann Radon just because my work wouldn’t exist without them. The Fourier transform is integral to MRI as the data is frequency encoded. For other imaging techniques that use projection data, e.g., CT, the Radon transform is important in image reconstruction using a technique called filter back projection.
You can read more here:
Medical Imaging 101 pt 3: MRI
Medical Imaging 101 pt 2: CT
Medical Imaging 101 pt 4: PET
On this list:
http://www.businessinsider.com/12-classic-mathematicians-2014-7?op=1
I would pick Rene Descartes because his contribution to philosophy is equally intriguing to me as well as his contributions to math.
#ScienceSunday h/t Michael O’Reilly for the link.
Image via Reddit
July 27, 2014
Henri Poincaré, hands down.
July 27, 2014
Newton and Euclid
July 27, 2014
Galois, just because the “what if he’d survived?” question is so tantalizing…
July 27, 2014
I see the gravity of your choices, Brigitte W.
May I conjecture, why you picked Henri, hands down, Theron Hitchman ?
July 27, 2014
Bahaha! You’re the apple
inof my eye, hon!July 27, 2014
Eric Merchant , I agree. Michael O’Reilly also said Évariste Galois was his favorite due to his tragic back story.
July 27, 2014
Thanks, Chad Haney! I might say Ramanujan, because I find it so hard to identify with the way he thought. Here’s a post by me in which I elaborate on this: https://plus.google.com/101584889282878921052/posts/74oomcTuJoV. I’m guessing there are a lot of other people who really like him, since that was my second most reshared post ever.
I also really like that gif. I was going to post something about it at one point, but there are already several G+ posts on that topic. It appears on Wikipedia somewhere.
July 27, 2014
Thanks for sharing, Chad Haney! I think pretty much every person on that list was pretty amazing.
July 27, 2014
Thanks Richard Green. I remember the Ramanujan post. Do you think Pi Day had something to do with the popularity of that post?
July 27, 2014
Michael O’Reilly I think you have a compelling reason to pick Évariste Galois.
July 27, 2014
Yes, it did, Chad Haney. That, and me leaving What’s Hot hooks all over the post. (For example: a picture of Ramanujan; a prominent image of the number pi; and an incomprehensible equation.)
July 27, 2014
Richard Green you certainly had a lot of variables covered in Google’s What’s Hot aka I can typing equation.
July 27, 2014
I guess that, like artists, most of the impact of their work is only recognized long after they’re gone but I am pretty sure that Edward Witten, alive today, will be added to such lists in the future. I am not going to pretend I have a clue what he’s on about but he’s probably one of, if not the most famous and prolific mathematician working today. He’s actually mostly a theoretical physicist but has contributed to so many fields you can’t really pin him down. So far he is the only physicist to have won the prestigious Fields Medal for his discoveries in mathematics.
July 27, 2014
The Fields Medal says a lot, Koen De Paus. Good choice and bonus points for selecting a living mathematician.
July 27, 2014
So is the math behind it, johnny conner Glad you like it.
July 27, 2014
Gauss.
July 27, 2014
Kathryn Huxtable I feel Gauss has a magnetic personality. I have to distribute my interest in mathematicians.
July 27, 2014
Heh!
July 27, 2014
Kurt Gödel…. because logic.
July 27, 2014
Well I was hoping you would pick an alien mathematician but going with logic is, well logical, Lacerant Plainer
July 27, 2014
We aliens are a logical bunch… 😉
And PXY would not make sense here!
July 27, 2014
I remember in a graduate level logic course in 1981 proving Gödel’s incompleteness and inconsistency theorems. It was fun back then.
July 27, 2014
Kathryn Huxtable indeed 🙂 I was thinking about the very same theorems recently.
July 27, 2014
Lacerant Plainer The genius of coming up with the Gödel numbers for representing formulae was brilliant in itself.
July 27, 2014
Logically, of course.
July 27, 2014
Leonhard Euler and Alexander Grothendieck.
July 27, 2014
I was tempted to say Grothendieck too, annarita ruberto, but there are aspects of his personality that rule him out for me. However, Euler would be high up on my list.
July 27, 2014
Richard Green Yeah I understand, but I love Grothendieck for his extraordinary insight and for pioneering and ingenious ideas.
We can say that Grothendieck like Einstein, through a mutation of
the conception that we have of space- in the mathematical sense from
one part and physical from the other and the innovation of our
look at the world through a unifying vision of mathematics
on one side and of physics on the other hand- assert themselves as
the mathematician and the physicist who revolutionized scientific thought
using the concept of relativity.
July 27, 2014
I’m with Richard Green on Euler. Euler had a big influence on engineering, at least the type of stuff I do.
July 27, 2014
Always people list the obvious (so boring IMO) candidates like Gauss or Euler or Archimedes. But I will have to go with George Green. Or Grassmann. These two were not only far ahead of their time (really Grassmann in particular); they were self taught, had very humble lives, and contributed arguably more than most mathematicians towards understanding the fundamental underpinnings of the universe.
I mean one was a self taught miller who provided key tools for understanding electromagnetism and another was a ‘highschool’ teacher whose work is still not fully appreciated and still has impact in the most advanced fields of physics (some in computer science too).
Few people I find, have heard of them. So I suggest them in lieu of the well trodden choices like …,Godel, Newton, etc.,etc.
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Green.html
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Grassmann.html
July 27, 2014
Chad Haney The merits of Euler are incalculable. For this reason I put him as the first in my personal preferences.
Maybe his greatest merit was to have been able to fix and connect fields of mathematics which were separate in his time, using in a brilliant way the resources of geometry, algebra and analysis, to get extraordinary results. Already in his time he enjoyed enormous prestige, witnessed by a famous phrase of Laplace: “Read Euler. Read Euler. He is master for all of us.”
July 28, 2014
annarita ruberto Your final line is why, as amazing as Euler was, I find him less compelling than Green. Advantages are probably best thought of as multiplying. So these little things: not being isolated, being recognized and celebrated, being in close contact with the top people, all of these will allow disproportionate advantages to the one who was not ignored for the majority of his life.
And I am certain Green’s mind must have been amazing to have overcome all that and still manage to pen one of the most important pieces of Mathematics ever:
> Yet despite the difficult circumstances and despite his flimsy mathematical background, Green published one of the most important mathematical works of all time in 1828.
…
An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism.
>Of course, Green never knew the importance of his mathematics. That was only realised after his death [1]:-
>>Only a few weeks before Green’s death, William Thomson had been admitted to St Peter’s College, Cambridge. In a paper by Robert Murphy published in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Thomson noticed a reference to Green’s Essay, although Murphy did not mention any of his other works published in that journal. Thomson was unable to find a copy of the Essay until, just after receiving his degree in January 1845, his coach, William Hopkins, gave him three copies. Sixty years later Thomson recalled his excitement and that of Liouville and Sturm, to whom he showed the work in Paris in the summer of 1845. After returning to Cambridge, Thomson was responsible for republishing the work, with an introduction (1850-54). Through Thomson, Maxwell, and others, the general mathematical theory of potential developed by an obscure, self-taught miller’s son would lead to the mathematical theories of electricity underlying twentieth-century industry.
July 28, 2014
Deen Abiola The question of the post is “Who’s your favorite mathematician?”, so each one of us has expressed his/her preference.
I know the history and the merits of George Green as well as I know his Essay : http://web.archive.org/web/20040725125804/http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/physics/gg/essay1.pdf
I know too the merits of Euler, so I remain of my opinion.
July 28, 2014
Well said annarita ruberto. It wasn’t intended to be a debate.