Great mathematicians

Abraham de Moivre (1667 – 1754), French. Great mathematicians

Great mathematicians
Abraham de Moivre correctly calculated the day of his own death. As he grew older, he needed longer sleeping hours. He noted that he was sleeping an extra 15 minutes each night and correctly calculated the date of his death on the day when the additional sleep time accumulated to 24 hours, November 27, 1754.

Great mathematicians. Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician and physical scientist

Physical scientist and mathematician Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. Great mathematicians

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, author of “Mathematics is the queen of sciences”. His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension, which itself occurs 40 days after Easter. Gauss would later solve this puzzle about his birth date in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years.

Newton

Isaac Newton in a manuscript in 1704 describes his attempts to extract scientific information from the Bible, he estimated that the world would end no earlier than 2060. Newton was deeply religious, and wrote more on Biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on science and mathematics.

Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German mathematician and philosopher, one of the inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. Meanwhile, Leibniz was charming, well-mannered, and not without humor and imagination. Besides, he had many friends and admirers all over Europe. By the way, Leibniz never married.

Omar Khayyam

Ghiyath ad-Din Abu’l-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrahim al-Khayyam Nishapuri is a real name of a Persian polymath – philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and poet Omar Khayyam. Khayyam was born in Nishapur, modern-day Iran, about thousand years ago, in 1048. The medieval Iranian calendar in which 2,820 solar years together contain 1,029,983 days (or 683 leap years, for an average year length of 365.24219858156 days) was based on the measurements of Khayyám and his colleagues. Khayyam’s calendar simply contained eight leap years every thirty-three years (for a year length of 365.2424 days). His calendar was more accurate to the mean tropical year than the Gregorian calendar of 500 years later. The modern Iranian calendar is based on his calculations.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

The deathbed puzzle which came to him in a dream from the Hindu goddess Namagiri – solved. Indian maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887, right 125 years ago, in Kumbakonam, Tamilnad. Ramanujan was self-taught and worked in isolation from the mathematical community of his time. He independently rediscovered many existing results, as well as made his own unique contributions. Ramanujan passed away at the young age of 32 of tuberculosis, but he left behind formulations in mathematics that have paved the path for many scholars who came after him.

While on his death-bed in 1920, Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote a letter to his mentor, English mathematician G. H. Hardy, outlining several new mathematical functions never before heard of, along with a hunch about how they worked. Decades years later, researchers say they’ve proved he was right – and that the formula could explain the behavior of black holes.