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Carl Friedrich Gauss
1777–1855 The schoolboy who, the story goes, found the shortcut through a hundred numbers
Big ideaBefore you start the arithmetic, look for the pattern underneath it.
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Blaise Pascal
1623–1662 The young man who put the weight of the air to the test
Big ideaChance can be counted, and a column of air can be weighed.
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Alan Turing
1912–1954 He imagined the computer before anyone could build one
Big ideaOne machine can do any calculation, if you feed it the right instructions.
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Leonhard Euler
1707–1783 The nearly blind man who worked out almost half his mathematics in his head
Big ideaCorners minus edges plus faces equals 2, for every flat-faced solid without holes.
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Paul Erdős
1913–1996 The mathematician who lived out of a suitcase
Big ideaMathematics is done best in company, so go where the problems are.
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Eratosthenes
c. 276–194 BC He measured the Earth with a well and a stick
Big ideaTwo shadows, about 800 kilometers apart, are enough to measure a planet.
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Pythagoras
c. 570–495 BC The theorem is real; the man is mostly fog
Big ideaIn a right-angled triangle, the squares on the two short sides add up to the square on the long one.
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Fibonacci
c. 1170–after 1240 The customs official’s son who taught Europe to count with zero
Big ideaTen symbols and the idea of place value can handle any number there is.
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Euclid
c. 325–265 BC The textbook that lasted two thousand years
Big ideaStart from a few plain truths and prove everything else, step by step.
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Girolamo Cardano
1501–1576 The gambling doctor who wrote down an impossible number
Big ideaChance obeys arithmetic, and so, it turns out, does the square root of a negative number.
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Srinivasa Ramanujan
1887–1920 The clerk who mailed a hundred theorems to Cambridge
Big ideaSome people can see what numbers are doing before anyone can prove it.
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Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749–1827 He worked out the odds that the Sun will rise tomorrow
Big ideaProbability is common sense turned into arithmetic.
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Bernhard Riemann
1826–1866 The shy pastor’s son who bent space
Big ideaSpace itself can curve, differently in different places, and we can measure it from inside.
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Pierre de Fermat
1601 or 1607–1665 The judge whose margin riddle lasted more than 350 years
Big ideaTwo squares can add up to a square; two cubes never add up to a cube.
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Katherine Johnson
1918–2020 The astronaut would not fly until she had checked the numbers
Big ideaOnce the engine stops, a spacecraft is a thrown stone, and a thrown stone can be calculated.
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Henri Poincaré
1854–1912 He found the limits of prediction, and had to pay for the printing
Big ideaThree bodies pulling on each other can move in ways no simple formula can predict.
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1646–1716 He wrote every number with 0 and 1
Big ideaTwo symbols are enough to write any number, and the right symbols make hard thinking easy.
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Ada Lovelace
1815–1852 The poet’s daughter who saw what a computer could become
Big ideaA machine that follows instructions can work on anything you can write as symbols, not just numbers.
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Terence Tao
born 1975 The youngest gold medalist in the history of the Olympiad
Big ideaAmong the prime numbers, evenly spaced runs of any length you like are waiting to be found.
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John Nash
1928–2015 A short thesis on how rivals really behave
Big ideaIn any contest with a limited number of choices, there is a way to play, sometimes by mixing moves at random, where nobody gains by changing alone.
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Georg Cantor
1845–1918 He counted past infinity, and found more than one
Big ideaSome infinities are bigger than others, and there is a way to prove it.
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John von Neumann
1903–1957 He drew the plan that almost every computer still follows
Big ideaKeep the program in the same memory as the data, and one machine can do any job you can write as a program.
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Joseph-Louis Lagrange
1736–1813 The quiet man who found the parking places in space
Big ideaAround any two bodies in orbit there are five points where a third can keep pace with them.
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