MATHEMATICIANS

              TOP 2 BRILLIANT MATHEMATICIANS

Math. It's one of those things that most people either love or hate. Those who fall on the hate side of things might still have nightmares of showing up for a high school math test unprepared, even years after graduation. Math is, by nature, an abstract subject, and it can be hard to wrap your head around it if you don't have a good teacher to guide you.

But even if you don't count yourself a fan of mathematics, it's hard to argue that it hasn't been a vital factor in our rapid evolution as a society. We reached the moon because of math. Math allowed us to tease out the secrets of DNA, create and transmit electricity over hundreds of miles to power our homes and offices, and gave rise to computers and all that they do for the world. Without math, we'd still be living in caves getting eaten by cave tigers.

Our history is rich with mathematicians who helped advance our collective understanding of math, but there are a few standouts whose brilliant work and intuitions pushed things in huge leaps and bounds. Their thoughts and discoveries continue to echo through the ages, reverberating today in our cellphones, satellites, hula hoops and automobiles. We picked five of the most brilliant mathematicians whose work continues to help shape our modern world, sometimes hundreds of years after their death. Enjoy!

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

We start our list with Sir Isaac Newton, considered by many to be the greatest scientist of all time. There aren't many subjects that Newton didn't have a huge impact in — he was one of the inventors of calculus, built the first reflecting telescope and helped establish the field of classical mechanics with his seminal work, "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica." He was the first to decompose white light into its component colors and gave us the three laws of motion, now known as Newton's laws. (You might remember the first one from school: "Objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force.")

We would live in a very different world had Sir Isaac Newton not been born. Other scientists would probably have worked out most of his ideas eventually, but there is no telling how long it would have taken and how far behind we might have fallen from our current technological trajectory.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Carl Gauss (1777-1855)

Isaac Newton is a hard act to follow, but if anyone can pull it off, it's Carl Gauss. If Newton is considered the greatest scientist of all time, Gauss could easily be called the greatest mathematician ever. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born to a poor family in Germany in 1777 and quickly showed himself to be a brilliant mathematician. He published "Arithmetical Investigations," a foundational textbook that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole numbers). Without number theory, you could kiss computers goodbye. Computers operate, on a the most basic level, using just two digits — 1 and 0, and many of the advancements that we've made in using computers to solve problems are solved using number theory. Gauss was prolific, and his work on number theory was just a small part of his contribution to math; you can find his influence throughout algebra, statistics, geometry, optics, astronomy and many other subjects that underlie our modern world.