Best all time mathematicians/physicists.

[John Creighto]

I'm wondering where philosophy fits in here. Contributions to science and marth aren't always about solving problems sometimes it is about shifting paradigms be it putting the sun in the center of the solar-system (Copernicus), basing science on measurable properties instead of subjective descriptions (Galileo in The Assayer), representing motion on the Cartesian plane (Descartes), removing the absoluteness of time (Einstein), quantifying infinities (Cantor), exposing the naivety of set theory (Burchant Russell).

There is an inter-play here of both philosophers making important contributions to math and science and mathematicians\scientists proposing axioms with striking philosophical implications.

 

[Sycatech]

Al-Khwarizmi, father of algebra

 

[jonjacson]

In physics I have three favourites:

Newton, if you read his biography and his works (in both math and physics) carefully, and you are conscient of the date he wrote all this works, you realize that he had one of the most powerful minds all over the history.Behind him, Maxwell made an incredibly job. Everithing was under the ideas of Newton, and he made a revolution introducing the concept of field , the main idea of a lot of theories of the XX century, he broke the tendency of using force to solve everything and made a very beautiful theory.

And I don't forget his works on statistics, and other subjects, so for me one of the bests of the history for sure.

Finally Einstein, his general theory of relativity and the way he found it is absolute incredible for his time.

And in mathematics, I agree that Riemann achievements are impressive, his originality is wonderful.

Perhaps you have not talked so much about cantor, but he made for the first time in the history something clear with the infinite(a slippery concept for everybody during centuries), so I would put him in the list.

 

[trambolin]

So where is this list anyway? It has been 9 pages there must be one!

 

[lubuntu]

In physics( I don't know much about mathematians) in no particular order here are the ones I am most inspired by:

Feynman
Newton
Einstein
Dirac
Maxwell
Faraday
Hawking

Not necessarily the greatest in terms of contributions just the ones I happen to look at with a good deal of pure awe.

Honorable mention for:
Copernicus
Kepler
Tycho Brahe
Galileo

For there work in getting the ball rolling as it were.

 

[epenguin]

I could say there is something that awes me that distinguishes Dirac from the others mentioned.

I would have said so even if I were not reading as I am at the moment The Strangest Man, the biography of this brilliant scientist and miserable git.

Scientists are mostly ‘constitutionalists’: they discover the constitution of the universe, its structures and components, what it is made of and how that stuff behaves. Galaxies, stars, solar system, earth, rocks, atoms, particles. Then some of them are (or also are) dynamicists, starting with those structures in a certain state, retrodict or predict what they will do (including evolve into something else). Newton, Laplace, Einstein, Schrodinger, Pauling… But these dynamicists had to predict starting with what there is (or what there can be thought to be). They had to take the constituents of the world for granted.

Whereas Dirac was the first to predict a constituent of the world. Not because of some missing mass (Lavoisier) or energy (Pauli) or there was a gap in what there is, so fill it (Mendeleev). But what there had to be. An experimentally unknown particle, the positron, only because otherwise his equations were not nice. Something of a different nature from all the others it seems to me, that raised the game of understanding Nature.

(Summarised in the books as 'he predicted and a few years later that was found experimentally', the biog. cited gives the somewhat more tortuous real historical story.) Then he did it again for the magnetic monopole, jury still out. Then his theory showing electrons not just had, but had to have, spin is perhaps at nearly the same level.

Since then other particles constituting the world have been predicted to exist and found, maybe another soon. And I read that String Theories are at the same time dynamics and constitution inseparably – but Dirac was the first of the kind.

 

[disregardthat]

What about Abel?

 

[robert Ihnot]

Underestimated Mathematicians:

Well, since no one I've read has mentioned Cardan/Cardano--who confessed to cheating on the solution of the cubic, making him a difficult person to celebrate these touchy classroom days; I have to say he was as Ore has written, "The Gambling Scholar."

He published 130 works and his Ars Magna gave solutions to the cubic and quartic equations. (The quartic was solved by his student Ferrari.) He was aware of imaginary numbers, but was unable to develope a successful theory about them.

It can be argued that he deserves credit for the cubic, since he was the first to publish. (In those days there was considerble secrecy about methods, but such is a hinderence to mathematical progress.)

Furthermore his abjuct confessions were a method of gaining favor with the Vatican, and he was restored to favor by Pope Gregory X111, and received a lifetime pension.

Ore insists that Cardano was the first to intelligently expound on the theory of probability, a century ahead of Pascal and Fermat.

 

[robert Ihnot]

I think it somewhat rediculous that Newton, because he was considered a Physicst, is generally ignored as a mathematician, when he was at the very top.

"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Newton's contemporary and a philosopher/mathematician in his own right who found himself at odds with Newton, told the Queen of Prussia that "In mathematics there was all previous history, from the beginning of the world, and then there was Newton; and that Newton's was the better half."

Newton did hold the Lucaisian chair of Mathematics, and deserved the title of "Mathematican." He worked out the binominal theorem for small fractions, and found the Taylor series for sins and cosigns among his other acievements. Also, today noted by students for his method of root location, sometimes called "Newton's iteration".

 

[mikeph]

I really don't know enough maths to comment on the level that some others have (read pages 1-4 and there is a lot of knowledge on those pages!), but my personal favourite came from Archimedes, his work to find pi without any tools that we have today was very impressive to me.

From physics I like Feynmann's totally conceptual approach. For top people, I have always thought Gauss and Euler simply because in almost every module I took there would be some link to one of these people.

 

[God's Pen]

for me,there is no "best mathematicians" or "best physicians" i think they all make the best.

 

[robert Ihnot]

Gib Z I don't even know the persons name who first isolated Oxygen!

Priestly in 1774 extracted oxygen from mercuric oxide. He discovered that it caused a flame to burned very brightly, and a mouse could be kept alive 4 times as long in "dephlogisticated air" as in regular air.

Priestly traveled to France and met Lavaisier, who named the gas, "oxygen."

 

[wisvuze]

Faraday is one of the most interesting ones, I've heard that his mathematical knowledge went only up to trigonometry and algebra (and I don't mean linear/abstract)

 

[epenguin]

Gib Z I don't even know the persons name who first isolated Oxygen!

Priestly in 1774 extracted oxygen from mercuric oxide. He discovered that it caused a flame to burned very brightly, and a mouse could be kept alive 4 times as long in "dephlogisticated air" as in regular air.

Priestly traveled to France and met Lavaisier, who named the gas, "oxygen."

Priestly made those observations but is debated whether you should call him the 'discoverer' or rather Lavoisier who conceptualised them and others as 'oxygen'. If you don't know what you have discovered have you discovered it?

Remind me whether Columbus knew he had discovered America?

 

[robert Ihnot]

wisvuze: Faraday is one of the most interesting ones, I've heard that his mathematical knowledge went only up to trigonometry and algebra (and I don't mean linear/abstract)

If you want a name of someone who had very little understanding, and even contempt of math, it is Edison. Edison put it very simply,

"I hire mathematicians, they don't hire me."

PS: Edison had a detactor in Tesla who said, "His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calcuation would have saved him 90% of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense." Wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison.

 

[AakashR]

Ramanujan, Gauss, Newton, Riemann, Einstein

 

[JustGaussing]

Physics: Maxwell
Math: Euler, Gauss
But then again, I am not particularly good at either, so how would I really know? There are so many, and each stands on the shoulders of giants who came before.

 

[ilikemaths]

I have to second Lagrange, if for no other reason than he fits the bill so well having approached mechanics as a purely mathematical field. I read somewhere that he took enormous pride in not including a single diagram in his Méchanique analytique.

 

[lavster]

apparently there was a poll and Maxwell came out on top. in physicsworld or new scientist or something like that. I like Newton. he was one of the founders of calculus and he did his three laws of motion etc.etc. :)

 

[RoughRoad]

Ramanujan! This guy, with no formal education of any sort, did so much in this field in just 32 years!

 

[henglin]

best mathematician or physician? Thats comparing a top fuel dragster with a formula 1 race car.

But id say Newton (maths and physics)
Einstein(physics along with maths)
gauss
archimedes
liu hui
leibnitz

 

[Clu2.0]

feynmann, einstein, john nash and neumann

 

[micromass]

I'd like to add Euler, Hilbert, Godel, Grothendieck.

 

[Outlined]

in no particular order, here are some that come to mind off the top of my head:
- Hilbert
- Euler
- Erdos
- Gauss
- Archimedes
- Galois

i don't think i know enough physics to have an opinion about physicists. i guess you could go through the list of nobel prize winners to find a bunch of the best ever.

Erdos? No, would say von Neumann or Newton.

 

[snipez90]

Euler and Lebesgue, mainly because I'm partial towards analysts.

 

[ejnorman]

Saunders Mac Lane for discovering general abstract nonsense.

Haskell Curry for discovering why equals can be substituted for equals.

 

[HallsofIvy]

What?? 166 posts and no one has listed me yet??

 

[mathwonk]

We live and learn. Earlier in this thread I dissed Euclid but praised Newton for his limit definition of a derivative. Then in Fall 2009 I actually read Euclid and discovered that his description of a tangent line uses the limit definition (if you think about it, that is precisely what Proposition 16, Book III, Elements, says, in the epsilon delta version) and thus anticipates Newton by over thousand years. I then learned that Newton read Euclid shortly before coming up with his own definition. Newton has not gone down, but Euclid has gone up in my estimation. I now consider his geometry book the best available even today.

 

[camilus]

Newton
Archimedes
Riemann
Gauss
Euler
Ramanujan
Grothendieck

What do you guys think of Grisha Perelman? I think he's absolutely brilliant.

 

[epenguin]

We live and learn. Earlier in this thread I dissed Euclid but praised Newton for his limit definition of a derivative. Then in Fall 2009 I actually read Euclid and discovered that his description of a tangent line uses the limit definition (if you think about it, that is precisely what Proposition 16, Book III, Elements, says, in the epsilon delta version) and thus anticipates Newton by over thousand years. I then learned that Newton read Euclid shortly before coming up with his own definition. Newton has not gone down, but Euclid has gone up in my estimation. I now consider his geometry book the best available even today.

That is a motivation.

Sorry, but I find this thread irritating and pointless when people just give names or lists without reasons or motivations, criteria.

 

[mathwonk]

Yes, this is like a video game break from real work. But try not to be irritated when you are not required to look at it. Life is stressful if you go out of your way to be irritated.

 

[Outlined]

Newton
Archimedes
Riemann
Gauss
Euler
Ramanujan
Grothendieck

What do you guys think of Grisha Perelman? I think he's absolutely brilliant.

only dead ones would count I think

 

[widderjoos]

I think the people who had the greatest impact on physics are:

Galileo
Maxwell
Weyl
Einstein

For math:

Gauss
Hamilton
Riemann
(Emmy) Noether

for having important contributions (imo).

Personally, I admire Kitchen and Feynman who got me into math and physics through their writings.

 

[JonF]

IMHO George Cantor.

 

[mxbob468]

neumann for all that he contributed to and the lore surrounding him