Famous Mathematicians

Archimedes

Life Facts

• Born in Syracuse, Italy
• About 75 years old when he died
• It is unknown whether or not Archimedes was married
• He went to a college named Alexandria

Contributions to Mathematics

• Archimedes' Principle
• -states that the upward buoyant force that is exerted on a body immersed in a fluid, whether fully or partially submerged, is equal to the weight of the fluid that the body displaces and acts in the upward direction at the center of mass of the displaced fluid

Contributions to Mathematics

• Archimedes' Screw
• -is a machine historically used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation ditches. Water is pumped by turning a screw-shaped surface inside a pipe.

Contributions to Mathematics

• Hydrostatics
• -the branch of fluid mechanics that studies fluids at rest

Occupations

• Mathematician
• Physicist
• Engineer
• Inventor
• Astronomer

Historic Events

• Second Punic War
• -Second major war between Carthage and the Roman Republic
• Conon of Samos
• -Famous astronomer was born
• Siege of Syracuse
• -The Romans attacked Syracuse. During the siege, the city was protected by weapons developed by Archimedes.

Interesting Events

• Considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity
• Archimedes died when a Roman asked him to meet Marcellus, but he denied him claiming he needed to finish his work. That's when the soldier killed him.

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi

Life Facts

• Born in Potsdam, Kingdom of Prussia
• Died at age 46
• Never did marry
• Went to Humboldt University of Berlin

Contributions to Mathematics

• Jacobi's elliptic functions
• In mathematics, the Jacobi elliptic functions are a set of basic elliptic functions, and auxiliary theta functions, that are of historical importance. They are found in the description of the motion of a pendulum as well as in the design of the electronic elliptic filters.

Contributions to Mathematics

• Jacobian/Jacobian matrix and determinant
• In vector calculus, the Jacobian matrix is the matrix of all first-order partial derivatives of a vector-valued function. When the matrix is a square matrix, both the matrix and its determinant are referred to as the Jacobian in literature.

Contributions to Mathematics

• Jacobi polynomials
• In mathematics, Jacobi polynomials are a class of classical orthogonal polynomials.

Occupation

• Mathematician

Historic Events

• Revolution of 1848
• -series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history.
• War of 1812
• -fought between the United States and Great Britain over British violations of U.S. maritime rights. It ended with the exchange of ratification of the Treaty of Ghent.
• Trail of Tears
• -Relocating Native American peoples from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States, to areas to the west that had been designated as Indian Territory.

Interesting Events

• In 1843 Jacobi had a breakdown from overwork
• He died from a smallpox infection
• In 1827 he became a professor at the University of Berlin

William Rowan Hamilton

Life Facts

• Born in Dublin, Ireland
• Died at age 60
• Married to Helen Maria Bayly with 5 children
• Went to Trinity College in Dublin

Contributions to Mathematics

• Hamiltonian mechanics
• -Hamiltonian mechanics is a theory developed as a reformulation of classical mechanics and predicts the same outcomes as non-Hamiltonian classical mechanics. It uses a different mathematical formalism, providing a more abstract understanding of the theory. Historically, it was an important reformulation of classical mechanics, which later contributed to the formulation of statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.

Contributions to Mathematics

• Hamiltonian
• -In quantum mechanics, a Hamiltonian is an operator corresponding to the total energy of the system in most of the cases.
• -Because of its close relation to the time-evolution of a system, it is of fundamental importance in most formulations of quantum theory.

Contributions to Mathematics

• Hamilton–Jacobi equation
• In mathematics, the Hamilton–Jacobi equation is a necessary condition describing extremal geometry in generalizations of problems from the calculus of variations, and is a special case of the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation.

Occupations

• Mathematician
• Astronomer
• Physicist

Historic Events

• March 3, 1820 - The Missouri Compromise bill passes in the United States Congress.
• April 3, 1860 - The Pony Express begins.
• February 3, 1809 - The Illinois Territory is created.

Interesting Events

• After being rejected by a woman he loved, he nearly committed suicide
• He was the fourth of nine children
• Not related to Alexander Hamilton

Bibliography

• https://www.britannica.com
• https://www.wikipedia.org/