I have been given a work to write a biography on an mathematician who is not an Indian ?

Question

I want to know a mathematician's about whom very less people know so that I will be in 1st position,

Answer 1

Stanislaw Ulam (Polish)
Born: 1909 Lwów, Poland
Died: May 13, 1984
Fields: Mathematics, Physics, Biology
Major Contributions: Set Theory, Topology, Branching Processes, Nonlinear Systems, and Monte Carlo methods.

Stanislaw Ulam was one of the many great mathematicians to come from the Polish school of mathematics. Born in the early 20th century in Lwów, Poland, he was contemporaries with the likes of Banach, Kuratowski, and Mazur.

Stan studied at the Lwów Polytechnic Institute, in the Department of General Studies (the quota had been reached in the Department of Electrical Engineering) beginning in the Autumn of 1927. In 1933, Stan was conferred the first Doctoral degree from the Department of General Studies at the Polytechnic Institute.

Following his studies, Stan travelled through Europe, and later crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. In the U.S., he was a visting scholar at a number of institutions, including Princeton (where he met John von Neumann), Harvard, and the University Colorado. By the early 1940's, Stan had found a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

The outbreak of the second World War was to lead to a monumental change in Stan's life. Stan wanted to do something for the war effort in the U.S., and, through the help of von Neumann, was offered an opportunity somewhere west of the Mississippi. As exerpted from Stan's Adventures:

Johnny said that there was some very exciting work going on in which I could possibly be of good use; he still could not tell me where it was taking place, but he traveled rather often from Princeton to that location.
I don't know why -- by pure chance or one of these incredible coincidences or prophetic insights? -- but I answered jokingly, "Well, as you know, Johnny, I don't know much about engineering or experimental physics, in fact I don't even know how the toilet flusher works, except that it is a sort of autocatalytic effect." At this I saw him wince and his expression become quizzical. Only later did I discover that indeed the word autocatalytic was used in connection with schemes for the construction of an atomic bomb.

Within the year, Stan would join the team of the world's leading physicists, chemists, and mathematcians working on the Los Alamos Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. They were to design and build history's first atomic bomb.
Stan's cheif contribution to the Project was in testing the theories and designs as the physicists (and mathematicians!) cranked them out. Instead of going up on a high Mesa each evening and pushing plutonium atoms together, Stan used mathematics to simulate the nuclear reaction which was to take place in the bomb. His method was to first find equations which governed the reaction, and then to analyze how these equations behaved.

Now, obviously, Stan could not have modeled each and every atom in the plutonium core. So he used statistics to help him. Stan would take random variables as input, compute the output from the equation, and repeat over and over. This would give him some set of results which he could analyze statistically. This method that Stan used would later be known as the Monte Carlo method.

In the early and mid 1940's, there were "computers" available for work on the Monte Carlo method in Los Alamos. Of course, these computers were simply humans which computed. In fact, Stan's wife Françoise was such a computer, one of about a dozen.

The Monte Carlo simulation of the Bomb was ideal work for computers. The world's first computer, the MANIAC, became functional during the several-month's work of the simulation at Los Alamos. In fact, the MANIAC was developed for use by the Los Alamos project in their simulation. Stan was a big supporter of computers and of their application to mathematical problems, both applied and theoretical. Later in life, Stan would be a big advocate for computers in the realm of Computatinoal Biology.

Stan was very much a humanistic fellow. He knew that the work on the atomic bomb, and later on the Super (hydrogen) Bomb would be of great importance. During his tenure at Los Alamos, he was quoted to have said, "It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs".

By the late 1960's, Stan had left Los Alamos for a University position in Boulder at the University of Colorado. He remained at the University until his death in 1984.

Answer 2

Vedic Apastamba Baudhayana Katyayana Manava Panini, ca. 5th c. BC, Algebraic grammarian Yajnavalkya, credited with authorship of the Shatapatha Brahmana, which contains calculations related to altar construction. Classical Post-Vedic Sanskrit to Pala period mathematicians (5th c. BC to 11th c. AD) Aryabhata - Astronomer who gave accurate calculations for astronomical constants, 476-520 Aryabhata II Bhaskara I Bhaskara II Brahmagupta - Helped bring the concept of zero into arithmetic Mahavira Matanga Muni - Combinatorics in music Varahamihira Shridhara (between 650-850) - Gave a good rule for finding the volume of a sphere. [edit]Medieval to Mughal period 13th century to 1800.13th century, Logician, mithila school Pakshadhara, son of Gangehsa, Logician, Mithila school Shankara Mishra, Logician, Mithila school Narayana Pandit Madhava of Sangamagramasome elements of Calculus Parameshvara (1360-1455), discovered drk-ganita, a modeof astronomy based on observations, Madhava's Kerala school Nilakantha Somayaji,1444-1545 - Mathematician and Astronomer, Madhava's Kerala school Mahendra Suri (14th century) Shankara Variyar (c. 1530) Vasudeva Sarvabhauma, 1450-1525, Logician, Navadvipa school Raghunatha Shiromani, (1475-1550), Logician, Navadvipa school Jyeshtadeva , 1500-1610, Author of Yuktibhasa, Madhava's Kerala school Achyuta Pisharati, 1550-1621, Astronomer/mathematician, Madhava's Kerala school Mathuranatha Tarkavagisha, c. 1575, Logician, Navadvipa school Jagadisha Tarkalankara, c. 1625, Logician, Navadvipa school Gadadhara Bhattacharya, c. 1650, Logician, Navadvipa school Munishvara (17th century) Kamalakara (1657) Jagannatha Samrat (1730) [edit]Born in 1800s Ramchundra (1821 - 1880) Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) A. A. Krishnaswami Ayyangar (1892-1953) Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893-1972) Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974) Sanjeev Shah (1803- 1896) Raghunath Purushottam Paranjape [edit]Born in 1900s Vijay Manohar (1901-1987) S. N. Roy (1906-1966) Sarvadaman Chowla (1907-1995) Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) D. K. Ray-Chaudhuri Harish-Chandra (1920-1983) Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao (1920-) Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar (1930-) Ramdas Lotu Bhirud(1937-1997) Jayant Narlikar (1938-) Srinivasa Varadhan (1940-) Vijay Kumar Patodi (1945-1976) Narendra Karmarkar (1957-) Mathukumalli V. Subbarao (1921-2006) Navin M. Singhi S. S. Shrikhande Raj Chandra Bose Canjeevaram Srirangachari Seshadri Narasimhan, M. S. Parthasarathy, K. R. Ramanujam, C. P. Raghavan Narsimhan Ramanan, S. Raghunathan, M. S. Madhav Nori Ramenjit Singh Gaurav Agrawal Manindra Agrawal (1966-) Akhil Sarikonda (1997 and on) [hide] v • d • e Indian mathematics Mathematicians Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar · Apastamba · Aryabhata I · Aryabhata II · A. A. Krishnaswami Ayyangar · Baudhayana · Bhāskara I · Bhāskara II · Melpathur Narayana Bhattathiri · Raj Chandra Bose · Satyendra Nath Bose · Brahmadeva · Brahmagupta · Brihaddeshi · Harish-Chandra · Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar · D. K. Ray-Chaudhuri · Sarvadaman Chowla · Halayudha · Jyesthadeva · Katyayana · Narendra Karmarkar · Madhava of Sangamagrama · Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis · Mahavira · Mahendra Suri · Manava · Munishvara · Narayana Pandit · Jayant Narlikar · Pāṇini · Parameshvara · Vijay Kumar Patodi · Pingala · Achyuta Pisharati · Srinivasa Ramanujan · Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao · S. N. Roy · Jagannatha Samrat · S. S. Shrikhande · Navin M. Singhi · Nilakantha Somayaji · Sripati · Sridhara · Mathukumalli V. Subbarao · Gangesha Upadhyaya · Varahamihira · Shankara Variyar · Virasena · Yajnavalkya

Answer 3

Alexander Grothendieck, probably the greatest living mathematician but virtually unknown outside the mathematical community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck

Answer 4

ISSAC NEWTON,--------Newton is regarded as the Father of Calculus (what he called the ``method of fluxions''); his most crucial insight being what is now called the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (that integration and differentiation are each other's inverse operation). He applied calculus to solve a variety of problems: finding areas, tangents, the lengths of curves and the maxima and minima of functions. Other mathematical works include the Binomial Theorem and the numeric Method which still bears his name

Answer 5

Colin MacLaurin, George Boole, János Bolyai to name a few.

Answer 6

Try Laurence H. Longley Cook, a British and then American actuary.

Answer 7

How about John Nash (see biography "A Beautiful Mind")?

Answer 8

Try Bertrand Russell, British philosoher and mathemetician. He was an interesting person, but not well known.