3 Famous Mathematicians

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3 Famous Mathematicians

• By Tyler Peck

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Pythagoras

• Pythagoras, who is sometimes called the "First
  Philosopher," studied under Anaximander,
  Egyptians, Babylonians, and the mystic Pherekydes
  (from whom Pythagoras acquired a belief in
  reincarnation) he became the most influential of
  early Greek mathematicians. He is credited with
  being first to use axioms and deductive proofs,
  so his influence on Plato and Euclid may be
  enormous. He and his students (the
  "Pythagoreans") were ascetic mystics for whom
  mathematics was partly a spiritual tool. He was
  Born on (578-505)B.C.

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Pythagoras

• Some occultists treat Pythagoras as a wizard and
  founding mystic philosopher. Pythagoras was very
  interested in astronomy and recognized that the
  Earth was a globe similar to the other planets.
  He and his followers began to study the question
  of planetary motions, which would not be resolved
  for more than two millenia. He believed thinking
  was located in the brain rather than heart. The
  words "philosophy" and "mathematics" are said to
  have been coined by Pythagoras

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Pythagoras

• His students included Hippasus of Metapontum,
  perhaps the famous physician Alcmaeon, Milo of
  Croton, and Croton's daughter Theano (who may
  have been Pythagoras's wife). The term
  "Pythagorean" was also adopted by many disciples
  who lived later these disciples include
  Philolaus of Croton, the natural philosopher
  Empedocles, and several other famous Greeks.
  Pythagoras' successor was apparently Theano
  herself the Pythagoreans were one of the few
  ancient schools to practice gender equality.

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Pythagoras
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Isaac (sir) Newton

• Newton was an industrious lad who built marvelous
  toys (e.g. a model windmill powered by a mouse on
  treadmill). At about age 22, on leave from
  University, this genius began revolutionary
  advances in mathematics, optics, dynamics,
  thermodynamics, acoustics and celestial
  mechanics. He is famous for his Three Laws of
  Motion (inertia, force, reciprocal action) but,
  as Newton himself acknowledged, these Laws
  weren't fully novel Hipparchus, Ibn al-Haytham,
  Galileo and Huygens had all developed much basic
  mechanics already, and Newton credits the First
  Law itself to Aristotle. However Newton was also
  apparently the first person to conclude that the
  ordinary gravity we observe on Earth is the very
  same force that keeps the planets in orbit.Born
  (1642-1727)

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Isaac (sir) Newton

• His Law of Universal Gravitation was
  revolutionary and due to Newton alone.
  (Christiaan Huygens, the other great mechanist of
  the era, had independently deduced that Kepler's
  laws imply inverse-square gravitation, but he
  considered the action at a distance in Newton's
  theory to be "absurd.") Newton's other
  intellectual interests included chemistry,
  theology, astrology and alchemy. Although this
  list is concerned only with mathematics, Newton's
  greatness is indicated by the wide range of his
  physics.

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Isaac (sir) Newton

• Even without his revolutionary Laws of Motion and
  his Cooling Law of thermodynamics, he'd be famous
  just for his work in optics, where he explained
  diffraction and observed that white light is a
  mixture of all the rainbow's colors. (Although
  his corpuscular theory competed with Huygen's
  wave theory, Newton understood that his theory
  was incomplete without waves.) Newton also
  designed the first reflecting telescope, first
  reflecting microscope, and the sextant.

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Isaac (sir) Newton

• Although others also developed the techniques
  independently, Newton is regarded as the Father
  of Calculus (which he called "fluxions") he
  shares credit with Leibniz for the Fundamental
  Theorem of Calculus (that integration and
  differentiation are each other's inverse
  operation). He applied calculus for several
  purposes finding areas, tangents, the lengths of
  curves and the maxima and minima of functions. In
  addition to several other important advances in
  analytic geometry, his mathematical works include
  the Binomial Theorem, his eponymous numeric
  method, the idea of polar coordinates, and power
  series for exponential and trigonometric
  functions. (His equation   ex ? xk / k!   has
  been called the "most important series in
  mathematics.")

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Picture of Isaac (sir) Newton
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William Rowan (sir) Hamilton

• Hamilton was a childhood prodigy. Home-schooled
  and self-taught, he started as a student of
  languages and literature, was influenced by an
  arithmetic prodigy his own age, read Euclid,
  Newton and Lagrange, found an error by Laplace,
  and made new discoveries in optics all this
  before the age of seventeen when he first
  attended school. At college he enjoyed
  unprecedented success in all fields, but his
  undergraduate days were cut short abruptly by his
  appointment as Trinity Professor of Astronomy at
  the age of 22. He soon began publishing his
  revolutionary treatises on optics, in which he
  developed the Principle of Least Action. He
  predicted that some crystals would have an
  hitherto unknown "conical" refraction mode this
  was confirmed experimentally.Born (1805-1865)

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William Rowan (sir) Hamilton

• Hamilton's Principle of Least Action, and its
  associated equations and concept of configuration
  space, led to a revolution in mathematical
  physics. Since Maupertuis had named this
  Principle a century earlier, it is possible to
  underestimate Hamilton's contribution. However
  Maupertuis, along with others credited with
  anticipating the idea (Fermat, Leibniz, Euler and
  Lagrange) failed to state the full Principle
  correctly. Rather than minimizing action,
  physical systems sometimes achieve a non-minimal
  but stationary action in configuration space.
  (Poisson and d' Alembert had noticed exceptions
  to Euler-Lagrange least action, but failed to
  find Hamilton's solution.

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William Rowan (sir) Hamilton

• Hamilton also made revolutionary contributions to
  dynamics, differential equations, the theory of
  equations, numerical analysis, fluctuating
  functions, and graph theory (he marketed a puzzle
  based on his Hamiltonian paths). He invented the
  ingenious hodograph. He coined several
  mathematical terms including "vector," "scalar,"
  "associative," and "tensor." In addition to his
  brilliance and creativity, Hamilton was renowned
  for thoroughness and produced voluminous writings
  on several subjects.

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William Rowan (sir) Hamilton

• Hamilton himself considered his greatest
  accomplishment to be the development of
  quaternions, a non-Abelian field to handle 3-D
  rotations. While there is no 3-D analog to the
  Gaussian complex-number plane (based on the
  equation   i2 -1  ), quaternions derive from a
  4-D analog based on   i2 j2 k2 ijk -1.
  (Despite their being "obsoleted" by more general
  matrix and tensor methods, quaternions are still
  in wide engineering use because of certain
  practical advantages.)

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Picture of William Rowan (sir) Hamilton