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/sci/ - Science & Math

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5573832 No.5573832 [Reply] [Original]

Who does /sci/ think is the smartest scientist/mathematician of all time? In my opinion it is John von Neumann, just look at all the shit he is known for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

>> No.5573833

>>5573832
Von Neuman was a calculation genius. He could do calculations very well and founds some interesting results. He wasn't very inspiring.

>> No.5573837

>>5573833
What are you talking about? He has inspired mathematics, physics, economics and computer science, and a lot more.

>> No.5573839
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5573839

>>5573832
to me, intelligence isn't weighed by contribution but by the ability to waltz.
that said, Dirac for me. As a founder of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, he left a massive legacy for the future ahead of us.

>> No.5573842

>>5573837
I'm not saying he wasn't a great person. Obviously he was. However he wasn't very original. He didn't really discover much. Other scientists and mathematicians had much more discoveries than he did.

>> No.5573847

>>5573832
I don't think that's a sensible question.


>clearly it's Grothendieck

>> No.5573855

>>5573837
Seriously, von Neumann did tons of pure math work like I'm rings of operators, etc which was WAAAAY more than just simplifying calculations.

Also, clearly grothendieck.

>> No.5574045

>>5573832
>2013
>not saying Gauss
>ishygddt

>> No.5574048
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5574048

are yall fucking serious

cf gauss had his drawers full of the next hundred years of mathematics at his time of death.

>> No.5574049

>>5574048
this anon knows.

>> No.5574074
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5574074

/thread

>> No.5574105
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5574105

/thread

>> No.5574123

>>5573832

Sagan

/thread

>> No.5574145

C s pierce

>> No.5574190

is he not the dude who played loud nazi marching music just to piss off einstein?

>> No.5574212

>>5574045
this, basically if you don't choose one of {archimedes, euler, gauss} you might as well just kill yourself

>> No.5574243

>>5574212
I would almost include Cauchy in that group. If he's not in that tier he's just below.

>> No.5574250

Gödel

>> No.5574252
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5574252

>> No.5574256

>>5574250

>> No.5574258

dat Gauss

>> No.5574275

>>5574190
He played loud GERMAN marching music. Plus, I doubt he did it because germans=nazis because Neumann was a jew himself

>> No.5574292

>>5574243
> After finishing school in 1810, Cauchy accepted a job as a junior engineer in Cherbourg, where Napoleon intended to build a naval base.
> engineer

>> No.5574296

>>5574145
this

>> No.5574323
File: 14 KB, 268x326, Alexander_Grothendieck.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
5574323

>>5573847
Agreed.

>> No.5574325

>>5573832

Gauss, Euler, von Neumann, Newton

But as far as cool discoveries Tesla, Bardeen, Maxwell, Mendleev

>> No.5574326

>>5574275
At Princeton he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German marching music on his gramophone, which distracted those in neighbouring offices, including Einstein, from their work.

From wikipedia

>> No.5574333

>>5574325
>Tesla
What 'cool discoveries' did he make?

>> No.5574344

>>5574333

AC, antenna theory, tesla coils

>> No.5574354

>>5574344
>AC
he didn't discover AC, that was jedlik or faraday, he just showed it was better than DC at power transmission

>> No.5574393

>>5574325
> tesla
> newton
science fan detected

>> No.5574394

Yutaka taniyama

>> No.5574397

>>5574354
and he was wrong, HVDC>AC

>> No.5574402

>>5573832

Maxwell.

>> No.5574409

It would probably Euler or Gauss, one of those Mathematicians who did extensive work in a broad range of fields. But since I have a soft spot for the theory of computation I'll have to go with Turing.

>> No.5574413

>>5574397
he was right at the time as good conversion tech did not exist

>> No.5574433

>>5573847
>>5574323
Anyone want to offer me a summary on Grothendieck? I'm not too keen on abs. algebra.

Also, I hear he's a recluse living in some mountains near France. Is he dead yet? Plans to go and explore for him?

>> No.5574456

I'm pretty sure JVN is the most intelligent person of the 20th century.
and I think it's decently likely that he's the most intelligent person ever to go into academia (there's probably many more extremely bright people who never became famous or contributed anything because they were born in a war torn, impoverished country or something like that)

>> No.5574461

I dunno.
Maybe Cauchy, Gauss or Neumann.

>> No.5574477

>>5574433

great mathematician who went batshit.
sadly it has become kinda common for great modern mathematicians.

>> No.5574492

>>5573832
Just read about this guy. The wiki article made me feel happy.

>> No.5574500

>>5574074
If going with pure intelligence and not lifetime accomplishments and contributions, it's without a doubt this guy.

>> No.5574508

>>5574500
Who is he?

>> No.5574512

>>5574508

Ramanujan.

>> No.5574530

>>5574512
Ah was this the guy who could talk about numbers and their attributes even on his deathbed?

>> No.5574953

>>5574433
did a lot of work on primes in different rings and how to make them into a topology, which really generalizes and helps organize entire categories of equations and the morphisms between them.

I don't know that much either, but I have started using a bit of his work when working with affine algebraic varieties (collections of polynomials which vanish over a topological space). I don't want to explain how to form a coordinate ring, you can just look that up, but he basically showed that you can create a zariski topology on the spec(R), which is the collection of primes in the ring. I know that this helps generalize a lot of other 'schemes' that are not algebraic varieties, but I haven't gotten there yet (I'm just a hobbyist). Rings are structures which can multiply and are an additive group, which can be things as diverse as all endomorphisms on an abelian group, polynomials over an arbitrary field or ring, rings of power series, etc. You can solve an entire collection of these by relating their solutions to a topological space and quotienting these relations out.

The basic stuff I've been doing looks like applications of the nullstellensatz, but I have started to learn about localization around primes, and it seems that grothendieck's work also helps find a converse to the fact that "all maximal ideals are prime, but not all prime ideals are maximal". That is, given a multiplicatively closed subset, you can form a prime, maximal with respect to something, then find what property each thing in Spec(R) is maximal with respect to. This apparently works for things that are not polynomials as well, such as collections of morphisms between categories, like localized rings, rings of homomorphisms, topological spaces which can be locally ringed, and other algebras which can be turned into graded rings.

Basically, don't worry about solving polynomials and algebraic topological problems anymore, or problems about the morphisms between those things.

>> No.5574986

>>5574326
No, I was saying that he did play loud German music. But he didn't play loud NAZI music, big difference.