14/12/2018 20 Mathematicians Who Changed The World - Business Insider

20 matemáticos que cambiaron el mundo

Walt Hickey 22 de julio de 2012, 4:22 p.m.

Antes de que los científicos

puedan desarrollar
medicamentos o los ingenieros
puedan hacer avanzar la
tecnología, lanzan números a
las pizarras utilizando
conceptos presentados por
Gottfried Leibniz, un matemático increíble
matemáticos a veces siglos
con la cabellera más fabulosa. Christoph
antes. Bernhard Francke, 1700

Las generaciones de niños en edad escolar no estarán de acuerdo,

pero ningún otro campo de estudio ha desempeñado un papel más
importante en cambiar el curso de la historia como matemáticas.

Desafortunadamente, los matemáticos a menudo obtienen poco

reconocimiento por sus contribuciones a la historia.

Estamos cambiando eso ahora mismo.

Hemos identificado a los 20 matemáticos responsables del mundo

moderno.

William Playfair, inventor de cartas

William Playfair, un ingeniero

escocés, fue el fundador de las
estadísticas gráficas . Además
de ese logro distintivo, en varias
ocasiones de su vida fue
banquero, contador, periodista,
economista y uno de los
Carta del día en 1786 William Playfair /
hombres que atacaron la Dominio Público
Bastilla.

Es difícil exagerar su importancia. Fue el inventor del gráfico de

líneas, el gráfico de barras y el gráfico circular. También fue
pionero en el uso de líneas de tiempo . Probablemente estés

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familiarizado con su trabajo.

James Maxwell, el primer fotógrafo

 en color. 

Maxwell fue un matemático

escocés que formó la teoría
electromagnética clásica. Esto
combinó siglos de investigación
en magnetismo, electricidad y
óptica en un marco teórico
único. Fue el primero en
Dominio publico
demostrar que la electricidad
viajaba a través del espacio a la
velocidad de la luz.

¿Cuán crucial fue él? Einstein mantuvo una foto enmarcada de

Maxwell en su escritorio junto a las imágenes de Michael Faraday y
Issac Newton. Fue el primero en desarrollar una fotografía en
color . Conectar la luz con el electromagnetismo es considerado uno
de los mayores logros de la física moderna. Es en muchos aspectos el
fundador de su campo.

Alan Turing, descifrador de la segunda guerra mundial

Alan Turing es un matemático

británico que es considerado el
padre de la informática. Su
trabajo sentó las bases para la
PC en la que probablemente
estés leyendo esto.

Una estatua de Turing en Bletchley Park

Turing es especialmente único Sjoerd ferwerda
en esta lista por sus esfuerzos
durante la Segunda Guerra
Mundial. Trabajando en el famoso Bletchley Park, Turing es
reconocido como una de las personas más importantes en el diseño
de las técnicas para romper el cifrado alemán Enigma .

Desarrolló el método por el cual la Bombe, una máquina

electromecánica masiva construida por los Aliados, podía romper el
Enigma a escala industrial, permitiéndoles leer casi toda la

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comunicación alemana. En ese sentido, es uno de los fundadores del

criptoanálisis moderno y, por todos los derechos, jugó una de las
partes más cruciales en ganar la Batalla del Atlántico para los Aliados.
 

Pierre-Simon Laplace, pionero de la estadística.

El marqués de Laplace fue

fundamental en el desarrollo de
la astronomía matemática y, lo
más importante, de las
estadísticas .

Laplace fue una de las primeras

Sophie Feytaud, 1841
personas en proponer la
existencia de agujeros negros .
Fue una de las fuerzas centrales detrás de la sistematización de la
teoría de la probabilidad , sentando las bases para lo que ahora se
denomina estadísticas bayesianas. Fue uno de los primeros en
estudiar la velocidad del sonido.

Thomas Bayes, promotor de estadísticas.

Thomas Bayes , un ministro Wikimedia Commons

presbiteriano, sentó las bases
para las estadísticas bayesianas.

Esencialmente, esa interpretación de las estadísticas analiza lo que se

puede decir sobre un estado existente dados los resultados de una
prueba estadística. El teorema de Bayes permite el cálculo de
probabilidades condicionales. Sin entrar en demasiados detalles, ese
teorema es un concepto esencial en el campo de las estadísticas
predictivas .

Charles Babbage, computer visionary

Babbage, an English The Illustrated London News, 1871

mathematician and inventor, is
considered the general "father
of the computer" for his proposal of the invention of the first
mechanical computing device.

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Babbage's difference engine was uncompleted in his life, but the work
he did motivated the field as it progressed. Funding problems
plagued the process, but his designs would go on to be proven sound.
He later designed an Analytical Engine
 which could hypothetically 

be programmed with punch cards.

Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer

Working with Charles Babbage, Margaret Sarah Carpenter, 1836

Countess Ada Lovelace is
considered by some to be the
world's first computer programmer.

She was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and was a corespondent of
Babbage's as he tried to build his difference and analytical engines.
She considered herself an "analyst" and Babbage described her as an
"Enchantress of Numbers." Dying at the age of thirty six, her
translations and notes today stand as both a historical record of
Babbage's research and one of the initial discussions of computer
programming.

David Hilbert, the patron saint of math teachers

David Hilbert, besides his Wikimedia

immense contribution to
functional analysis, may as well
be the patron saint of math teachers.

He is one of the founders of proof theory and was a leader in the

mathematics field. One of his most important accomplishments was
creating, in 1900, a legendary collection of 23 unsolved problems.
The problems would go on to set the syllabus for the entire field for
the 20th century. In doing so, Hilbert inspired and motivated
generations of mathematicians.

Euclid of Alexandria, prover of math

Euclid, an ancient Greek Mark A. Wilson

mathematician alive during the
reign of Ptolemy I in 323-283 BC,
was the author of Elements, which served as the primary textbook for
mathematics until the dawn of the 19th century. He originated
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Euclidean Geometry, and while perhaps not demonstrably

responsible for the modern era, Euclid was certainly responsible for
most of the elementary mathematics that led to it.
 

Euclid was among the first to formalize mathematical proofs, the

primary method of exposition for the discipline.

Issac Newton, inventor of calculus

While not exactly obscure, this Godfrey Kneller , 1689

list would be incomplete
without a mention of Sir Issac
Newton, the English luminary of the Scientific Revolution.

Newton developed early physics, a scientific method, the theory

of universal gravitation, and calculus. He advanced the
technology of the telescope, and developed Newtonian Mechanics.
Newton's laws are well known today even by people outside of the
scientific community. His impact on modern physics is nearly
impossible to overstate.

Gottfried Leibniz, always in Newton's shadow

German Gottfried Leibniz Christoph Bernhard Francke, 1700

invented infinitesimal calculus
independent of Englishman Sir
Issac Newton. His notation is still widely used today.

He was an avid inventor of mechanical calculators and added

multiplication and division functions to Pascal's calculator. He
refined the binary number system in the late 1600s, enabling the
development of digital computers centuries later. A notorious
optimist, Leibniz coined the phrase "the best of all possible worlds."

Joseph Lagrange, simplified Newton's work

Few mathematicians have made Unknown Artist, 18th Century

as great a contribution to the
field as Lagrange. His legacy is
so immense, his is one of 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower and
he is buried in the Pantheon, the national tomb for great Frenchmen.

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Lagrange essentially created the science of partial differential

equations from 1772 to 1785. Today that science is used to model heat,
sound, electrodynamics and additional difficult-to-model
information. Besides that, he entirely
 re-formulated and 

simplified Newton's equations of classical mechanics. Lastly, he

also advanced the solution to the three-body problem, one of the
trickiest problems in physics.

Blaise Pascal, inventor of the first calculator

Blaise Pascal was a French Anonymous Portrait

mathematician and physicist
active in the 17th century. He
clarified the concept of pressure and vacuum.

Pascal invented an early version of the roulette wheel and created

the hydraulic press. He developed the syringe. He also made early
contributions to probability theory and actuarial science, and made
the first mechanical calculator.

John von Neumann, early developer of the digital

computer

Hungarian-American John von von Neumann's Los Alamos I.D. picture

Public Domain
Neumann was credited as one of
the greatest mathematicians of
his age. Besides his widespread contributions to broad disciplines
within pure mathematics, he also did a great deal of work in the
applied fields.

Von Neumann was the first to propose the concept of Mutually

Assured Destruction to the United States during the Cold War.
Besides that, he also proposed the concept of a self-replicating
automata. He is a key figure in the development of the digital
computer. He worked out steps to completing a thermonuclear
reaction.

Leonhard Euler, a mathematician with an imagination

A Swiss mathematician who Public Domain / Wikimedia

spent most of his life in Russia,
Leonhard Euler is considered
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the preeminent mathematician of his generation.

Euler was the first to introduce the concept of the function which in
and of itself is an immense achievement.
 That set the stage for all 

mathematical development since. He was the first to ascribe the

letter "e" to mean the base of the natural logarithm, the first to
use "i" for the imaginary unit, and he assigned sigma for
summation. He introduced Euler's formula, a trigonometric
equation, and he developed the Euler's identity, eπi + 1 = 0. His impact
on mathematics is profound.

Daniel Bernoulli, built the foundations of aerodynamics

Daniel Bernoulli, a Swiss Johann Jakob Haid, Public Domain

mathematician, is remembered
for his contributions to fluid
mechanics and his work in statistics and probability. He was one of
many members of the Bernoulli family to make significant
contributions to mathematics.

He was one of the first people to try to develop a kinetic theory of

gasses. Bernoulli's principle is a critical aspect of aerodynamic
research. He was a medical pioneer, applying available statistics
to describe a smallpox outbreak in 1766. For those in finance and
economics, he wrote the initial theory on risk aversion and utility.

Carl Freidrich Gauss, behind everything we know about

statistics

Gauss is considered to be one of Astronomische Nachrichten, 1828

history's most influential
mathematicians. A German
child prodigy, Gauss would later lend his name to an immense
amount of discoveries even after his death.

The bell-curved normal distribution is a now central element of

modern-day statistics and is sometimes referred to as the Gaussian
distribution. Gauss also was interested in the field of differential
equations, which are pervasive in modern engineering. He was also
central in developing the theorem which established important
properties of curvature. He would later co-design the first
electromagnetic telegraph in 1833.

Joseph Fourier, explained the greenhouse e ect

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Joseph Fourier was orphaned at

Public Domain / Wikimedia
the age of eight and later served
on his local Revolutionary
Committee during the French Revolution.
 Fourier joined Napoleon 

on his expedition to Egypt, and played a role in the translation of

the Rosetta Stone.

He contributed to thermodynamics, dimensional analysis, and

developed a partial differential equation describing the diffusion of
heat that is today taught in elementary physic lectures. In the 1820s
he was one of the first to recognize the atmosphere's impact on
retaining heat, now known as the Greenhouse Effect.

Theodore von Kármán, the mind behind the helicopter

and supersonic flight

Born to a Jewish family in NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Budapest, von Kármán exited
Europe in 1930 to accept a
position at Cal Tech. He founded the company Aerojet.

Early in his career he designed a primitive helicopter. Von Kármán

became an important mathematician behind the idea of supersonic
flight, conducting research about turbulence, airfoil and supersonic
aerodynamics. During the Second World War, von Kármán consulted
for the Air Force about German rocket potential. He founded NATO's
aeronautics research group.

Stanislaw Ulam, developer of the Monte Carlo simulation

A participant in the Manhattan Los Alamos Laboratory

Project, the Polish Jewish
mathematician is the latter half
of the Teller-Ulam design of a thermonuclear weapon.

Besides his work in nuclear physics, Ulam also developed the Monte
Carlo method of simulation. This method involves running hundreds
of simulations to estimate the probability of an event. This strategy is
in consistent and pervasive use in modeling today.

And that barely scratches the surface.

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Now, see the ten most Pi

important numbers in the
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