Mathematicians

Pythagoras

495 BCE

He is the Greek forefather of math as we know it and credited with is known for his theorem regarding triangles with right angles that states "The area of the square built upon the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares upon the remaining sides."

Hypatia

360

Hypatia, from Egypt, led the life of a respected academic at Alexandria's University and is best known for her ability to explain mathematics clearly to her students.

Cardano

1501

Cardano, the Italian doctor, was a compulsive gambler which led him to study probability and create a theory. Probability theory and his 131 books led to statistics, marketing and weather forecasting.

Euler

1707

Euler, Swedish author of over 900 books is most famous for eiπ + 1 = 0, where e is the mathematical constant sometimes known as Euler's number and i is the square root of minus one.

Gauss

1777

Gauss, a German, discovered that non-Euclidean space is mathematically consistent that parallel lines may diverge but never published it. This was found in his notes post mortem. He is also know for his analysis of astronomical data; he realised that measurement error produced a bell curve; that shape is now known as a Gaussian distribution.

Cantor

1845

Cantor was a German mathematician who developed set theory.

Erdös

1913

Erdös was a prolific mathematician considered 2nd only to Euler. He wrote about 1,500 papers, with 511 collaborators. An "Erdös number" is given to mathematicians according to their collaborative proximity to him: a 1 for people who have authored with him and a 2 for those who have authored with mathematicians with an Erdös number of 1, etcetera.

Conway

1937

Conway is an Englishman active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He is currently a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey. He is famous for coming up with the Game of Life rules in 1970.