Curated playlist
Number theorists
- Jacob BernoulliJacob Bernoulli's tombstone in Basel shows the wrong spiral.
- Joseph-Louis LagrangeAt seventeen, mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange read a paper by Edmond Halley and was seized by mathematics.
- Leonhard EulerLeonhard Euler kept producing math after going almost totally blind. In 1775 he wrote about one paper a week.
- Luca PacioliLuca Pacioli's 1494 textbook told accountants not to sleep until debits equalled credits.
- EuclidEuclid, the father of geometry, left almost no confirmed facts about his own life.
- EratosthenesEratosthenes measured the Earth using a shadow in Alexandria and a sunlit well in Syene.
- Pafnuty ChebyshevA limp kept Pafnuty Chebyshev off the playing fields and steered him toward mathematics.
- Srinivasa RamanujanSrinivasa Ramanujan was ill in a hospital at Putney when G. H. Hardy came to visit him. Hardy had ridden there in taxi cab number 1729. He remarked that the number seemed rather dull, and he hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. Ramanujan…
- Terence TaoTerence Tao scored 760 on the math section of the SAT when he was only eight years old. Only two other children in the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program have ever reached 700 or more at that age. That boy grew up to be an…
- Paul ErdősPaul Erdős, the Hungarian mathematician born in 1913, spent most of his adult life living out of a suitcase. Time magazine called him "The Oddball's Oddball". His biographer Paul Hoffman went further and described him as "probably the most…