They were great mathematicians. Archimedes, Gauss and Newton are probably the greatest ever.
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Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, Euler, Grothendieck
The greatest mathematician of modern times is Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855). He is also known as "Prince of Mathematicians", "greatest mathematician since antiquity" and "German Archimedes". According to Felix Klein, greatest mathematician of the nineteen century, "if we seek heroes of roughly equal stature in the history of our science, only two forerunners of Gauss can be considered to have been equally blessed by nature: Archimedes and Newton" (in "Development of Mathematics in the 19th Century", page 55).
This question is too general to give a short answer to. The top three names are usually considered to be Archimedes, Newton, Gauss (in historical order). Some more are Euclid, Fermat, Leibniz, the Bernoulli family, Euler, Laplace, Lagrange, Weierstrass, Hilbert, Noether, von Neumann. A very extensive website is http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/ - look at the Biographies Index. There is an overwhelming amount of information here. A book on the history of mathematics will give an overview.
# # Archimedes of Syracuse # Isaac Newton # Carl F. Gauss # Leonhard Euler # Euclid of Alexandria # Bernhard Riemann # Henri Poincaré # David Hilbert # Joseph-Louis Lagrange # Pierre de Fermat # Niels Abel # Alexander Grothendieck # Évariste Galois # Srinivasa Ramanujan Iyengar # Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz # Eudoxus of Cnidus # Karl Wilhelm Theodor Weierstrass # Leonardo `Fibonacci' Pisano # Blaise Pascal # René Déscartes # Brahmagupta `Bhillamalacarya' # Augustin Cauchy # Georg Cantor # John von Neumann # Aryabhatta # Kurt Gödel # Arthur Cayley # Carl G. J. Jacobi # Amalie Emma Noether # Pierre-Simon Laplace # Pythagoras of Samos # Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl # Muhammed ibn Musâ al-Khowârizmi # Apollonius of Perga # William Rowan Hamilton
He was the greatest mathematician of modern times and one of the three greatest ever, along with Archimedes and Newton. Gauss defined the modern concept of mathematical rigour, consolidated number theory as an important field and was a pioneer in non-euclidean geometry. He also proved connections between complex numbers,algebra and geometry and built important developments in physics (electromagnetism, optics and practical astronomy). He was probably the last man to dominated the all fields of mathematics.