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Mathematicians — Lives behind the theorems

Eleven figures, twenty-five centuries. From a Greek cult leader who heard the world as ratios to a wandering Hungarian who slept on his colleagues' couches...

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Eleven figures, twenty-five centuries. From a Greek cult leader who heard the world as ratios to a wandering Hungarian who slept on his colleagues' couches — the people who invented the language we count, calculate, and reason in. Key sections include: MATHEMATICIANS Lives behind the theorems; Pythagoras; Euclid; Archimedes; Isaac Newton; Leonhard Euler; Carl Friedrich Gauss; Bernhard Riemann; Srinivasa Ramanujan; Emmy Noether.

Key sections

  • 01MATHEMATICIANS Lives behind the theorems
  • 02Pythagoras
  • 03Euclid
  • 04Archimedes
  • 05Isaac Newton
  • 06Leonhard Euler
  • 07Carl Friedrich Gauss
  • 08Bernhard Riemann
  • 09Srinivasa Ramanujan
  • 10Emmy Noether
  • 11Alan Turing
  • 12Paul Erdős
  • 13Further reading & viewing

Topics covered

catalogmathmathematicians

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Slide outline
  1. 01MATHEMATICIANS Lives behind the theorems
  2. 02Pythagoras
  3. 03Euclid
  4. 04Archimedes
  5. 05Isaac Newton
  6. 06Leonhard Euler
  7. 07Carl Friedrich Gauss
  8. 08Bernhard Riemann
  9. 09Srinivasa Ramanujan
  10. 10Emmy Noether
  11. 11Alan Turing
  12. 12Paul Erdős
  13. 13Further reading & viewing
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Updated
2026-05-17
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

MATHEMATICIANSLives behind the theorems

  • A biographical gallery
  • ❦ ❦ ❦
  • Eleven figures, twenty-five centuries. From a Greek cult leader who heard the world as
  • ratios to a wandering Hungarian who slept on his colleagues' couches — the people who
  • invented the language we count, calculate, and reason in.
  • Pythagoras → Erdős
  • 13 slides
Slide 02

Pythagoras

  • No. 01 · Antiquity
  • P Y T H A G O R A S
  • Samos · Croton
  • c. 570 – 495 BC
  • Founded a secretive religious-mathematical brotherhood in southern Italy where members
  • swore oaths, abstained from beans, and treated number as the substance of reality.
  • "All is number." The theorem on right triangles bears his name though Babylonian
  • scribes knew the relation a millennium earlier.
  • "Discovered" musical ratios — that a string halved sounds an octave higher —
  • and inferred from it that the cosmos is harmony made audible.
Slide 03

Euclid

  • No. 02 · Hellenistic Alexandria
  • E U C L I D
  • Alexandria
  • fl. c. 300 BC
  • Compiled the Elements — thirteen books that derived plane geometry,
  • number theory and solid geometry from five postulates and a handful of common notions.
  • For two thousand years, learning mathematics meant learning Euclid; only the Bible has
  • been printed in more editions.
  • Almost nothing survives of Euclid the man. We know him only through the rigour of the
  • text and a remark to King Ptolemy: "there is no royal road to geometry."
Slide 04

Archimedes

  • No. 03 · Syracuse
  • A R C H I M E D E S
  • Sicily
  • c. 287 – 212 BC
  • Bounded π between 3⅙ and 3⅞, calculated areas with proto-integration,
  • designed war machines that held off the Roman fleet, and ran naked from his bath
  • shouting Eureka! after grasping displacement. Killed by a Roman soldier
  • while drawing circles in the sand — "Do not disturb my diagrams."
  • "Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth." — on the lever,
  • which he was first to analyse mathematically.
Slide 05

Isaac Newton

  • No. 04 · Cambridge
  • N E W T O N
  • Woolsthorpe · Trinity
  • 1643 – 1727
  • In two plague-haunted years at his mother's farm, the young Newton invented the
  • calculus, decomposed white light with a prism, and wrote down the inverse-square law
  • of gravitation. The Principia (1687) explained the planets, the tides, and
  • the falling apple from a single set of equations.
  • Also: alchemist, biblical exegete, Master of the Royal Mint who hanged counterfeiters.
  • "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
Slide 06

Leonhard Euler

  • No. 05 · St Petersburg · Berlin
  • E U L E R
  • Basel-born
  • 1707 – 1783
  • The most prolific mathematician in history — some 866 publications, occupying 90+
  • volumes and still being edited. Founded graph theory (the Bridges of Königsberg),
  • standardised the notation of e, i, π and Σ, and kept working
  • after going blind in 1771 by dictating to scribes.
  • His identity eiπ + 1 = 0 binds five fundamental
  • constants in nine symbols — routinely voted the most beautiful equation ever written.
Slide 07

Carl Friedrich Gauss

  • No. 06 · Göttingen
  • G A U S S
  • Brunswick · Göttingen
  • 1777 – 1855
  • Schoolboy prodigy who summed 1 to 100 in seconds. By 24 he had written
  • Disquisitiones Arithmeticae — the foundation of modern number theory —
  • and predicted where the lost dwarf planet Ceres would reappear, restoring it to
  • astronomers via least-squares regression he had quietly invented.
  • Called Princeps mathematicorum, the Prince of Mathematics. His motto:
  • pauca sed matura — few, but ripe.
Slide 08

Bernhard Riemann

  • No. 07 · The Hypothesis
  • R I E M A N N
  • Hanover
  • 1826 – 1866
  • Reinvented geometry by treating space as a curved manifold — the mathematics
  • Einstein needed half a century later for general relativity. Founded modern complex
  • analysis. In a single ten-page paper proposed the Riemann Hypothesis, still
  • the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics.
  • All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function lie on the line Re(s) = ½.
  • One million dollars to whoever proves it. He died of tuberculosis at 39.
Slide 09

Srinivasa Ramanujan

  • No. 08 · Madras · Cambridge
  • R A M A N U J A N
  • Erode · Trinity
  • 1887 – 1920
  • A clerk in colonial Madras, largely self-taught from a single textbook, who filled
  • notebooks with thousands of identities for partitions, modular forms and infinite
  • series — many discovered, he said, in dreams from the goddess Namagiri. G. H. Hardy
  • brought him to Cambridge in 1914.
  • Visiting his sickbed, Hardy mentioned his taxi was 1729 — "a rather dull number."
  • "No," said Ramanujan, "it is the smallest expressible as the sum of two cubes
  • in two different ways." Dead at 32.
Slide 10

Emmy Noether

  • No. 09 · Erlangen · Bryn Mawr
  • N O E T H E R
  • Erlangen
  • 1882 – 1935
  • The mother of modern abstract algebra. Reformulated rings, ideals and fields in the
  • language still used today. Her 1918 theorem — every continuous symmetry of the
  • laws of physics yields a conservation law — is the silent hinge of all
  • modern theoretical physics.
  • Forbidden to lecture in Göttingen as a woman, she taught for years under Hilbert's
  • name. Expelled by the Nazis in 1933, she died of an ovarian-cyst operation at Bryn Mawr
  • two years later.
Slide 11

Alan Turing

  • No. 10 · Bletchley Park
  • T U R I N G
  • King's College
  • 1912 – 1954
  • At 23 defined what computation is — the universal Turing machine —
  • and proved the halting problem unsolvable. At Bletchley Park led the team that broke
  • the German Enigma cipher, shortening WWII by an estimated two years. Founded
  • theoretical computer science and, with the Imitation Game, AI.
  • Convicted of "gross indecency" in 1952 for being gay, sentenced to chemical
  • castration, and dead by cyanide at 41. Britain pardoned him in 2013.
Slide 12

Paul Erdős

  • No. 11 · Everywhere
  • E R D Ő S
  • Budapest · the world
  • 1913 – 1996
  • Hungarian number theorist who renounced home, possessions and most meals to live out
  • of a suitcase, criss-crossing five continents to co-author papers with anyone willing.
  • Some 1,500 papers with 500+ collaborators — more than any mathematician in history.
  • Your Erdős number is the shortest co-authorship distance to him.
  • Einstein's was 2; Chomsky's, 4. Coffee was, he said, the device that turns
  • mathematicians into theorems.
Slide 13

Further reading& viewing

  • Coda
  • Two short documentaries that bring two of these lives to the screen —
  • and a starting bibliography for the rest.
  • Ramanujan on YouTube
  • The man who knew infinity — lectures, films, archive footage.
  • youtube · search
  • Noether's Theorem on YouTube
  • Symmetry and conservation, explained in plain language.
  • youtube · search
  • E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics (1937) ·
  • Constance Reid, Hilbert (1970) ·
  • Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity (1991) ·
  • Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (1983) ·
  • Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998).
  • ❦
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