Who are the great mathematician and their contributions?

Answer 1

Ahmes was the Egyptian scribe who wrote the Rhind Papyrus - one of the oldest known mathematical documents.

Thales was the first known Greek philosopher, scientist and mathematician. He is credited with five theorems of elementary geometry.

Pythagoras was a Greek philosopher who made important developments in mathematics, astronomy, and the theory of music. The theorem now known as Pythagoras's theorem was known to the Babylonians 1000 years earlier but he may have been the first to prove it.

Euclid was a Greek mathematician best known for his treatise on geometry: The Elements . This influenced the development of Western mathematics for more than 2000 years.

Heron or Hero of Alexandria was an important geometer and worker in mechanics who invented many machines including a steam turbine. His best known mathematical work is the formula for the area of a triangle in terms of the lengths of its sides. A is the area of a triangle with sides a, b and c and s = (a + b + c)/2 then A^2 = s (s - a)(s - b)(s - c)....

Menelaus was one of the later Greek geometers who applied spherical geometry to astronomy. He is best known for the so called Menelaus's theorem.

François Viète was a French amateur mathematician and astronomer who introduced the first systematic algebraic notation in his book In artem analyticam isagoge . He was also involved in deciphering codes. he calculated π to 10 places using a polygon of 6 216= 393216 sides. He also represented π as an infinite product which, as far as is known, is the earliest infinite representation of π.

Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer who postulated that the Earth and planets travel about the sun in elliptical orbits. He gave three fundamental laws of planetary motion. He also did important work in optics and geometry.

René Descartes was a French philosopher whose work, La géométrie, includes his application of algebra to geometry from which we now have Cartesian geometry. His work had a great influence on both mathematicians and philosophers.

Leonhard Euler was a Swiss mathematician who made enormous contributions to a wide range of mathematics and physics including analytic geometry, trigonometry, geometry, calculus and number theory. Firstly his work in number theory seems to have been stimulated by Goldbach but probably originally came from the interest that the Bernoullis had in that topic. Goldbach asked Euler, in 1729, if he knew of Fermat's conjecture that the numbers 2^n + 1 were always prime if n is a power of 2. Euler verified this for n = 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 and, by 1732 at the latest, showed that the next case 2^(32) + 1 = 4294967297 is divisible by 641 and so is not prime. Euler also studied other unproved results of Fermat and in so doing introduced the Euler phi function (n), the number of integers k with 1 k n and k co prime to n. He proved another of Fermat's assertions, namely that if a and b are co prime then a^2 + b^2 has no divisor of the form 4n - 1, in 1749. Other work done by Euler on infinite series included the introduction of his famous Euler's constant , in 1735, which he showed to be the limit of

1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + ... + 1/n - log(e) n

Lagrange excelled in all fields of analysis and number theory and analytical and celestial mechanics. He also worked on number theory proving in 1770 that every positive integer is the sum of four squares. In 1771 he proved Wilson's theorem (first stated without proof by Waring) that n is prime if and only if (n -1)! + 1 is divisible by n.