/sci/ - Science & Math

Jacob Barnett

Also sage

Failed most of his exams, couldn't get into good schools, threw a blackboard eraser at an examiner, kicked out of school, threatened the king, had a secret love affair (maybe), killed in a duel at 20 years old. Spent his final week knowing that he was going to die violently, and wrote down all his mathematical knowledge, most of which wasn't understood or appreciated for a good 50 years.

Keynes

>>6458565
Paul Krugman

>>6458570
>>6458570
Keynes was originally a mathematician, you cheeky cunt.

>>6458576
Yes, everybody knows about Keynes' mathematical work.

>>6458550
>Ramanujan

Pop-mathematician pls go.

Myself.

Riemann, Lawvere

I am my favorite mathematician.

>>6459721
No, I am.

Dat nazi bearded beauty

Archimedes. apart from having an amazing engineering mind that I really appreciate, my middle name is Archimedes. yeah. that's my only reason.

>>6458562
Agree with this anon, Evariste Galois was one of the best mathematicians ever, and his work on group theory is extremely important.

I would also include some physicist/mathematicians, like Hermann Weyl and Emmy Noether.

No one likes me :(

>>6459936
most of what Euclid did was common sense, though of course it was revolutionary in his time

>>6458550
Ramanujan is my favourite too. He was an absolute genius. He intuitively derived:
<span class="math"> x+n+a = \sqrt{ax+(n+a)^2 +x\sqrt{a(x+n)+(n+a)^2+(x+n) \sqrt{\cdots}}} [/spoiler]

London and their lack of vegetarian food killed him though. Imagine if he had lived longer.

>>6459970
His pi approximation is another astonishing one. I mean how the fuck do you just come up with coefficients like that, fucking crazy. Pic related.

ITT: Math plebs who never studied math seriously.

>>6459975
I've looked at that. It's absurd. He's without a doubt the best intuitive mathematician ever.

>>6458562
He was the best mathematician after euler and the best kind of person for me. He was doing what he felt like while being smart.

>>6459975
I doubt he just picked those numbers at random. There is probably some analysis or geometrical intuition that guided him.
>notice: I am not belittling his contributions

>>6459984
You're right, he derived it. But these aren't typical numbers you see in derivations. They're no squares, or 2^something, or primes or anything like that, which indicates the derivation he must have done would have been very odd.

>>6459977
I wish I could Differential Geometry :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Mathematik

Today I found out there exists Mathematicians certain of the Jews are bad Mathematcians

Vladimir Arnold

Who is the greatest and/or most popular/known mathematician living today?

>>6460027
Wiles, I'd say.

>>6460027
>greatest
Voevodsky
>most popular
Tao

>>6460030
>Wiles, I'd say.
LMAO. Spoken like a true neophyte.

>>6460034
>Voevodsky

He's a true genius. He'll be the greatest once Grothendieck dies. But for now, Grothendieck is the greatest living mathematician.

>>6460038
>implying Grothendieck is alive

>>6460038
I was responding to most popular. I should have clarified.

Newton is cliche but yeah great mind
shat out calculus and classical mechanics during the plague and didn't afraid of anythin

>>6460027
Terry Tao

>>6460055
Terry just finished his GUT and will be presenting it to Oxford tomorrow

>>6460027

>>6460027
grigori perelman

because he's not an academia/media sheep. he's the definition of a true mathematician. he get's shit done and that's it, no big deal because there should have never been a big deal

>>6458550
Gödel

>>6460120
Mr.I broke Maths and made David Hilbert Butthurt

Supernova Kasprzak

>>6460120
nigger was tripping most of the time

>>6458550
>Ramanujan
>best mathematician of the 20th century
Sure, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is the best scientist of the 21st century i'm sure

>2014
>not realizing Hardy and Littlewood fabricated the entire Ramanujan thing to impress gullible idiots like the OP
>not realizing that even if Ramanujan is legit, his "discoveries" amount to highly sophisticated mathematical trivia, stuff that nobody cares about, even pure number theorists only care about it to the extent they can get a few publications out of filling his numerous, gaping gaps

>>6460042
>>implying Grothendieck is alive

Show me his grave. How about obituary? You're just trolling.

>>6460168
>>not realizing that even if Ramanujan is legit, his "discoveries" amount to highly sophisticated mathematical trivia, stuff that nobody cares about, even pure number theorists only care about it to the extent they can get a few publications out of filling his numerous, gaping gaps

Exactly right. None of his stuff was actually useful.

To be a great mathematician, you have to invent NEW THINGS that are actually USEFUL.

Greatest mathematicians of all time are Euler, Gauss, Euclid, Hilbert, Grothendieck, Cauchy Leibnitz/Newton.

>>6458562
>Galois
>minor algebrist
>does an emo kamikaze thing and now he's fucking immortalized
if he hadn't been romanticized by ten thousand slobbering math historians, he'd be remembered as slightly less of a mathematician than, oh, say, Legendre or something

>>6459968
all mathematics becomes common sense thousands of years after its time. that's the entire point of mathematics. to make common sense out of what was once mysterious

>>6460174
>To be a great mathematician, you have to invent NEW THINGS that are actually USEFUL.

Seriously dude? By that logic most of mathematics is worthless since applications are only developed after the mathematics.

>>6460168
>not realizing Hardy and Littlewood fabricated the entire Ramanujan thing to impress gullible idiots like the OP
It's certainly true that a lot of Ramanujan's work is completely fucking pointless other than saying "oh. That's cool." but I think you're stretching it to say he's made up.

You think Hardy would take hours and hours away from his mathematical research just to come up with shit like this
>>6459975
for the sole purpose of trolling people?

I mean, most of Ramanujan's theorems are true. So if Ramanujan didn't derive them himself, somebody else did.

>>6460027
I would say that because of the pressures of capitalism exerted on academia, there are no really great mathematicians today, outside of maybe Perelman (of course), Leo Harrington, and Donald Martin.

We're on the cusp of a new dark ages.

Plenty of mathematicians getting tons of kudos for a whole lot of useless BS, though. I guess the dark ages were a good time for snake oil

I'll also say Perelman. I just like the way he doesn't care about anything he doesn't consider essentially important and I think his dedication is admirable if inimitable.

>>6460030
Wiles is really annoying, and a living demonstration of why the whole "giant massive overglorified open problem" model of mathematics is so badly broken.

>Be in the right place at the right time
>Swoop in when 99% of the work's been done
>Solve a big open "problem" that nobody would care about if not for the backstory/history/tradition (FLT has pretty much zero applications, even in the purest depths of pure)
>Billions of 12 year olds make piss-soaked shrines to you

>>6460202
You sound like a bitter old bastard.

>>6460049
Newton's an interesting answer.
He's extremely difficult to judge, BECAUSE he was so successful:
he was so successful that his work is taught to undergrads, which in turn makes it SEEM unremarkable. Kind of a Seinfeld thing

>>6460120
This is probably the truest answer in the thread, actually.

>>6460127
>broke maths
Spoken like a true pleb. Hey, I bet netflix has "what the bleep do we know" available, why don't you go watch that a million times and never both /sci/ again? :)

>>6460179
Congratulations, you are qualified to go post on tvtropes.com

However, you're not yet qualified to post on /sci/ please gtfo and never come back

(For any intelligent readers on the sidelines: all mathematicians worth their salt are focused on applications, albeit not necessarily "applied math" type applications (muh cancer models), but even logicians and number theorists are doing what they do so as to accomplish something

>>6460222
>qualified to post on /sci/

>>6460187
>You think Hardy would take hours and hours away from his mathematical research

Hardy famously spoke about how he only spent 4 hours a day doing math. Of course, that too was probably bullshit made up for the math historians, but if there's even an ounce of truth to it, then he had tons of spare time to "troll" (or rather, make up shit to make him and Littlewood more famous)

Also, that identity you link to is not as amazing as you think. The point of mathematics is to demystify, the identity in question serves only to intimidate, while shedding no light on anything except how autistic Hardy was

>>6460222
You yourself name Euler and then go say a dumbass thing like that. How did the Seven Bridges problem offer any promise of application when Euler solved it?

Frederick the Great on Euler's talent at application:

"I wanted to have a water jet in my garden: Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water to a reservoir, from where it should fall back through channels, finally spurting out in Sanssouci. My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a mouthful of water closer than fifty paces to the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!"

>>6460247
The Seven Bridges problem is indeed a curiosity, but at the time it was one that was widely discussed and nobody could solve it. That's why it's significant (that and the connections to graph theory, but I agree with you that that's more incidental, and not really deserved, Euler was NOT a graph theorist)

Konigsberg Bridges is not really a good example of Euler's genius though.

Frederick the Great was a layman in the dark ages, making him about as smart as a 2-year-old in 21st century terms.
>lulz this anecdote shows that math failed once (cuz Euler didn't factor in all the infinitely many variables, and also cuz, you know, he wasn't a fucking engineer ya nimrod)
>please ignore all these lasers and space programs and encryption algorithms and computers and things behind the curtain

>>6460215
>>and never both /sci/ again?
>Comes to /sci/
>Can't even spell the word 'bother'
Don't worry, Elementary school won't mind taking you back in even after flunking out 15 years ago.

>>6460253
What DID Euler do that had direct application in his day?

Seriously if you can name say, four things, I'll consider the argument lost. Otherwise you ought to act less stridently arrogant. Whether or not Euler was an engineer isn't relevant to the question of his motivations were. His failure in a small engineering endevour (infinitely many variables in designing a water pump? are you serious?) indicates that application may not have been at the forefront of his mind.

I'm leaving myself wide open here for you to come up with only four practical applications that were based off of Euler's work in his lifetime. If you do not I'll just consider it demonstrated that you have been a blowhard.

>>6460164
He died in a cave alone.

>>6460278
>talking about which mathematicians are better
>comparing based on practical applications
dafuq?

>>6460342
I was not the one prescribing that approach, that would be the guy I replied to.

>>6460278
>talking about which mathematicians are better
>comparing based on practical applications

i don't think you know what a true mathematician is

>>6460344
I just saw something retarded and replied, I don't know who's who in this thread

>>6460349
You have eyes. You are most probably literate. If you have time to post on /sci/ you have time to scan the thread and guess who is who.

>>6460351
Yes, because that's so important.

>>6460354
If you are going to accuse someone of not knowing what a true mathematician is without knowing who it is you're accusing, why bother? There is a board specifically for pointless bickering.

Archimedes for his time, burning ships and generally not giving a fuck.

>>6460356
>insults me for pointless bickering
Sorry for introducing bickering to this thread, which was completely free of pointless bickering before.

Anyway, I'd like to say my favorite mathematician is Hermann Weyl.

>>6460356
Why bother? Because maybe I can explain to that person that a true mathematician doesn't care about practicality.

>>6460361
"Sorry for killing people in this death camp, which was free of murder before"

>>6460367
Ok ok I'm sorry, at least I contributed my favorite mathematician.

Hermann Weyl. What do you think?
(I favor mathematicians who had an impact on physics.)

>>6460368
Well go do that.

>>6458550
leibniz, no question

>>6459970
>london killed him
He could have, you know, eaten meat. I guess he wasn't smart enough to figure that out.

von neumann

his contribution to the fields of computing, maths, physics and economics are astounding

as far as scientists go i'd have to go with carl sagan. i really admire him for stimulating the public's awareness in science through cosmos, his participation on the discovery of greenhouse gases on venus and his efforts on the viking's landing site, amongst other achievement.

i really do fanboy over him

>>6460202
… and Wiles got it WRONG as well. Taylor had to fix it. Which just goes to show how average Wiles is.

At least Perelman got it right on the first try.

And Clay math prizes have done more damage to math than have helped it.

>>6460446
The guy you replied to was making a joke. He died because of liver problems, and once he went into hospital all they fed their patients was white bread. This was a problem because he was there a long time and it had effects over the long term. It was his liver that killed him though. He did talk about how he hated the food in London though. Also, tell me more about how one of the greatest mathematicians ever and most intuitively logical thinkers "wasn't smart."
I'm not even mad, bro.

>>6460247
>You yourself name Euler and then go say a dumbass thing like that. How did the Seven Bridges problem offer any promise of application when Euler solved it?

You are a complete doofus for trying to shit on Euler.

Euler was motherfucking BLIND for most of his adult life and couldn't see shit but he still produced more output, while 100% BLIND, than when he had his eyesight. Russian tsar and russian Empress had a bunch of people whose job was to serve Euler's every wish and write down every one of the solutions he wanted to work on.

And guess what, they're still publishing his works because he produced so much of it that it's taking 100s of years for them to collate it all and put it in books. He wrote more and solved more than anyone that has ever entered the filed of mathematics.

http://www.ms.uky.edu/~corso/teaching/math330/eulerssums.pdf

In short, you're not worthy of even writing the man's name down on a board.

>>6460553
Reading comprehension is such a bore.

Niels Henrik Abel.
Norwegian mathematicians. Died at age 26.

>His most famous single result is the first complete proof demonstrating the impossibility of solving the general quintic equation in radicals. This question was one of the outstanding open problems of his day, and had been unresolved for 250 years. He was also an innovator in the field of elliptic functions, discoverer of Abelian functions.
>Most of his work was done in six or seven years of his working life.

>>6460202
>Wiles is really annoying, and a living demonstration of why the whole "giant massive overglorified open problem" model of mathematics is so badly broken.

Please elaborate on the "model"-aspect.
Would you say there is a "this is how mathematics is done and perceived" way today, and was it ever different?

>>6459970
If he was so smart how come he died from malnutrition?

>>6460027
Malcolm Gladwell

Bernoulli

>>6458562

Doing an hero doesn't make you the best mathematician immediately, even though his work despite having minor education was astounding.

>>6460959

Why would you post this guy? Are you a brazilian?

>>6460984
From wikipedia
>A 1994 analysis of Ramanujan's medical records and symptoms by Dr. D.A.B. Young concluded that it was much more likely he had hepatic amoebiasis, a parasitic infection of the liver widespread in Madras, where Ramanujan had spent time. He had two episodes of dysentery before he left India. When not properly treated, dysentery can lie dormant for years and lead to hepatic amoebiasis,[6] a difficult disease to diagnose, but once diagnosed readily cured.[6]
I'm pretty sure he didn't forget to eat.

>>6460984
See
>>6460540

>>6461057
It is his favorite mathematician. Therefore he posted his picture.

>>6461057
I'm from Vienna, but I find the work of the south American and Australian school interesting. Getting rid of the material implication in particular.

>>6461057
I'm from Vienna, but I find the work of the south American and Australian school interesting. Getting rid of the material implication in particular.

>>6461144
I actually posted >>6459716

Grothendieck

>Undoubtely one of the greatest mathematicians of the XX century. He made groundbreaking contributions to modern theory of algebraic geometry.

>>6460446

I think he just avoided it for religious reasons.

He had great potential in Mathematics but was still a product of his culture; I dunno, maybe he just didn't give much attention to anything but math.

I think it is the case that many logicians and those that dedicate themselves to philosophy typically find it difficult to be overly dogmatic about their faith. But it wasn't uncommon over history for men who made great strides specializing in other fields to lead otherwise unremarkable lives or show no great interest or propensity in other subject matter. Newton himself divulged in occult and various superstitions.

Gödel.

>>6461418
Also, his name makes it sound like he had a big penis.

>>6461418
Since the 1990s he lives a hermit hunter gatherer lifestyle in a mudhut in the Pyrénées. What a waste of talent.

He's such a faggot that he refuses to allow people to look at around 20 000 pages of his work which is currently rotting away in a storage room.

Honestly can't wait till he dies so that his work can finally be published.

>>6461446
>I think it is the case that many logicians and those that dedicate themselves to philosophy typically find it difficult to be overly dogmatic about their faith.
It seems to me to be the opposite. The very bright mathematicians have been subject to extreme religiosity, by which I mean a deep commitment to their own opinions at the cost of losing the ability to see the sense of others'. Compare Godel, the kinetic energy debate of newton/leibniz, Russel and Wittgenstein's forceful opinions on the adequacy of alternative philosophies, etc. It's like they achieve a permanent state of hyperfocus.

>>6461596
I would second this. They are naturally obsessive people.

>>6461595
I'm sure there have been a few mathematicians who have been able to sneak in a look or two, here and there. They don't dare say anything, though.

I would, at least. If some mathematician had his papers in a vault in the institute/University I'm working at, I'd definitely try to see if I can try to get in somehow and view some of the papers.

>>6460202
Hmm, I think you'll find that Wiles did 99% of the work to prove FLT, including a load of stuff along the way. These related items (such as the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture) do have significant mathematical applications.

>>6461595
>>6461601
the 20 000 pages of his work are stored in the university of Montpellier (french city).
Grothendieck gave them to his student Jean Malgoire, but wrote a note which forbides their publication
(http://tqft.net/misc/Grothendieck%27s%20Declaration.pdf))

Luc Gomel, the man in charge of the legacy of Montpellier university emitted the idea to make his work classified as "national treasury". It would indeed constitue a trick to bypass the will of Grothendieck and give open access to his work (at least for scientists).

No news since 2012

>>6461596
It's because you never get to a concrete answer if you have to people who disagree but don't care enough to argue their point to the literal end..

Ergo if you want that concrete solution you need to be willing to exhaust all possibilities, like an obsessive cunt.

>>6461595

>Since the 1990s he lives a hermit hunter gatherer lifestyle in a mudhut in the Pyrénées. What a waste of talent.

There have been bigger wastes of mathematical talent...

>>6461701
qt<span class="math">\pi[/spoiler]

captcha: Tedlizo same

>>6461596
It can be difficult to witness supremely sublime beauty and still believe it is essentially meaningless. This is what provokes people to make silly claims like e^ipi - 1 = 0 proves the existence of God.

>>6461701
Form Kaczynski's perspective the only waste was the time he spent doing mathematics.

>>6461737
><span class="math">e^{i \pi} -1 =0[/spoiler]
>supremely sublime beauty

nope :)
Just a trivial result of the analytic continuation of <span class="math">\mathrm{exp} : \mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{C}[/spoiler] ;)

>>6461750
Beholder's eye etc. etc.
For an omniscient being mathematics would indeed be obvious and trivial.

>>6461595
People joke about it but I swear one day in 2030 or something some lost hiker is going to stumble upon a little shack, and then go inside and find a skeleton and tens of thousands of pages of original mathematics.

>>6461595
>>6461418

Do you think that in his work, there are some new groundbreaking maths included?

Imagine that

Maybe he stumbled upon some breathtaking things, even as an Mathematician and thought about it and decided that humanity wasn't ready for this knowledge until another few decades!

tesla

>>6461854
We'll know in a few years.

Actually you're not far from why he stopped doing maths. Basically he became some sort of anarcho-pacifist-ecoprimitivist who believed that mankind was going towards nuclear warfare, and that maths had too many military applications and should be destroyed.

>>6461418
>>6461595
hope he burns it all just to fuck with you

Hey /sci/, mind if I ask a question (perfect thread for it, no need for a new one) - if I study pure math, how much more study would I need to be able to do astrophysics? Possible or do the two diverge quite early on?

>>6461854
>Maybe he stumbled upon some breathtaking things, even as an Mathematician and thought about it and decided that humanity wasn't ready for this knowledge until another few decades!

Nothing against the man or his talent, but him trying to play ultimate judge of mankind would turn him into a superdick.

Anyway, whatever his wishes are those papers are going to either
a) Turn out to be nothing so they're never "declassified"
b) Actually have something worth of note and the government will be "nope, that goes out".

>>6461953
>how much math do I need to do astrophysics
Do you have a high school diploma?
Yes? Then you're done.

Hamilton

>>6461965
>the government
as if french government gave a single fuck...

>a) Turn out to be nothing so they're never "declassified"
it's hard to say actually: NOBODY has legally access to them.

>>6460127

aka Mr. I broke Relativity and made Albert Einstein butthurt.

Cedric Villani

I'd have to say Euler, because he's a swaglord. Other than that, I'd say Napier because he invented the natural logarithm before e was even discovered

Big Dick

>>6462559
Nope.

>>6461667
Grothy came up with Schemes, Topoi and then Motives.
>yfw the 20 000 pages rotting somewhere pre-anticipate all of Connes work on non-commutative geometry and the motivic Galois group and turbulence/renormalization/quantum gravity is long solved

>>6461667
When he dies and the pages get published the world as we know it will change.

>>6462579
And then the name of a Nazi will once again be carved in the stone of history?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grothendieck%E2%80%93Teichm%C3%BCller_group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Teichm%C3%BCller#Life

>>6460346
Read their conversation in full, that is not what he is saying at all.