Mathematical Chronology
www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk
Mathematical Chronology
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#2Wondering how much from the last 100 years has been left out
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#3Wondering how much from the last 100 years has been left out
Probably a huge amount given that ~50% of the mathematicians* who have ever been alive are alive today.
Source: Pure Mathematics Hons BSc, St Andrews - I took the St Andrews "History of Mathematics" course this site's information is used in.
*For a given value of 'mathematician'. And 'alive', I guess.
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#4I'm not a mathematician, but I've always been fascinated by two specific periods in the history of mathematics: Around 1750-1850 where you have Gauss, Fourier, Poisson, Laplace, Navier, Cauchy, Lagrange, Euler. That's just... insane.
And then the mathematics that happened around ~1940.. Kolmogorov, Fisher, Poincaré, Gödel, Von Neumann, Church, Turing...
Just crazy.
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#5A guy I knew used to say that this is why computer science is so much easier to learn than number theory. It's thousands of years of number theory to learn vs a few dozen years of computer science. On top of that, the recent historical explosion of computer science is also accompanied by perhaps an even larger explosion of number theory.
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#6Fascinating.
Nitpick: It would be even nicer if the images on the main page were annotated with the person's name. I recognized e.g. Einstein and Turing, but who are all the others?
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#7Pro tip – Cmd/Ctrl+F for "independently". Research redundancy :)
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#8I'm not a mathematician, but I've always been fascinated by two specific periods in the history of mathematics: Around 1750-1850 where you have Gauss, Fourier, Poisson, Laplace, Navier, Cauchy, Lagrange, Euler. That's just... insane. And then the mathematics that happened around ~1940.. Kolmogorov, Fisher, Poincaré, Gödel, Von Neumann, Church, Turing... Just crazy.
Funnily enough, I think the same.
The first is the stuff you do in school. Always good to have context, which sadly there's little time for.
The second is fundamentals and computing stuff, and stats. There's a good chance you'll have to use a computer to calculate things over large datasets sometime in your life.
Crypto is interesting as well.
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#9If we consider the topical chronology/lineage stemming from Euclid's Elements, and how much of our world relies on Mathematics, one could argue that it is the most influential book ever written.
Re: Mathematical Chronology
#10It doesn't seem to mention the works of the Indian mathematicians from Kerala, India on calculus. I think their work predated that of Newton and Leibniz.