Counting on Them

1. Counting on Them Mathematicians of the Times Evan Sauve

2. Pythagoras of Samos • I was born circa 570 BC in Samos (island in Greece). • I traveled to Egypt, in search of wisdom. I might have been the first man to call himself a philosopher (lover of knowledge). • I started a religion and it was quite successful. The practices were all based on my philosophies. • A well-known mathematical theorem bears my name. I did not discover it; I proved it.

3. Euclid of Alexandria • I was born circa 300 BC. My birthplace is unknown, but my residence was Alexandria, Egypt. • My name is Greek, an means “Good Glory.” • My book Elements was used as the primary textbook for mathematics until well into the 1800s. • I am considered the father of geometry.

4. Archimedes of Syracuse • I was born circa 287 BC in Syracuse, Sicily. • I am known for my work on siege engines and screw pumps that now bear my name. It has been claimed that I built machines that could lift ships out of water or set them on fire with an array of lights. • I was killed during the Siege of Syracuse by a Roman soldier. He asked me to go with him, but I was too busy doing a circles problem in the sand. • “Eureka!” (I have found it) is what I shouted when I discovered that the upward buoyant force that is exerted on a body when submerged in a fluid is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces. This principle now bears my name.

5. Fibonacci • I was born circa 1170 in Italy. • My book Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation) helped spread the Hindu-Arabic numeral system through Europe. (It’s the one we still use.) • The popular mathematical problem “the bee ancestry code” is solved using my sequence. My sequence is also used the approximate the golden ratio. • 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…are the beginning terms of my sequence.

6. René Descartes • I was March 31st, 1596 in La Haye en Touraine, Kingdom of France. • I am well-known for my work in both philosophy and mathematics. • I am known as the father of analytic geometry – the bridge between algebra and geometry. • The Cartesian plane was my invention.

7. Isaac Newton • I was born December 25th, 1642 in Lincolnshire, England. • I share credit for the invention of Calculus, even though Gottfried Leibnitz didn’t release his work until four years after mine. • Based of the work of scientists before me, I formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation. This was released in my book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). • An apple actually didn’t fall on my head.

8. Leonhard Euler • I was born April 15th, 1707 in Basel, Switzerland. • I gave mathematics the ideas of notation for a functions and for summation. • A circle with nine specific points that can be inscribed in any triangle bears my name. • A line, bearing my name, shows that the circumcentre, centroid and orthocentre of a triangle are collinear.

9. Carl Friedrich Gauss • I was born April 30th, 1777 in Brunswick, Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, Holy Roman Empire. • I am considered the last great mathematician. Since my time, mathematics has developed too much for anyone to be a master of all the branches. I am a successful contributor to probability. • In primary school, I was asked to find the sum of integers between 1 and 100. I said the answer (5050) within seconds of being asked. • I am often called The Prince of Mathematics.

10. Alan Turing • I was born June 23rd, 1912 in London, England. • I formalized the ideas of computation and algorithms with a machine I made. It was a general purpose computer. • I am widely considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. • During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School, Britain’s codebreaking centre. I led a group focused for German naval cryptanalysis.