Plus I think the stuff current mathmaticians & scientists are working requires such an advanced understanding of the topics that when discoveries are made, it requires someone with an advanced education in the field to even explain what it means. I cant count the number of times I read a headline and an article and not had the slightest clue about what was said.
Arguably, the greatest mathematician ever was Gauss.
The most prolific mathematician ever was likely Euler.
Neither, unfortunately, would be a household name.
Sure you can name some mathematicians. Isaac Newton was a mathematician. I guess he was also a physicist. Back then people were not so specialized, so “smart guys” could probably just do a bunch of things.
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As an undergraduate student, I was required to take a Philosophy class.
I settled on “Logic”; it was innocuous, and I could get an “A” without breathing hard.
On our first exam we were asked to name two philosophers who contributed to the development of logic, and list what they were best known for.
One of the philosophers I named was Leibniz, and I wrote that he was best known for inventing calculus. (That last bit wasn’t in our textbook.)
The professor marked me wrong on that latter bit.
I challenged him. If he had wanted to know Leibniz’ best-known contribution to logic, I contended that he should have asked for that. (And I would have written that.) I said that if he were to walk downstairs, into the quad, grab 5 students at random, and ask them why Leibniz was famous, if any of them had even heard of Leibniz, it would have been from their calculus class.
He didn’t relent.
I still got an “A” on the exam, and in the class.
A couple of years later, he was convicted of murdering the boyfriend of a coed with whom he was enamored. I guess he finally got his.
Very true, obviously most achievements in these fields are built off earlier works. Those early discoveries may seem more “basic” to us now because civilization has evolved and the average human is significantly more educated than back then. I think mathmaticians/scientists appreciate those before them around the world more so than others because they can recognize this, any discovery now is done on the backs of so many others who laid the tracks for them to reach a new discovery. Discoveries in the future will be built of research being done now! I certainly wish I was intelligent enough to be working in a field like that doing research, but as Judge Smails said “the world needs back office employees” or something like that
Wow that went from 0 to 100… real quick.
Really, really quick.
By the way: do you know who Ken Miles is?
Yeah there are definitely some mathematicians an educated non-mathematician can name. I was going to say Leibniz, but s2k brought it up in the thread. Sitting on the loo here, I can think of Descartes and Pascal. Newton already came up in this thread. There was that guy Al Gebra from the Middle East too, who probably hung out a lot with his namesake Al Cohol.
Then you can start to remember the names of theorems and constants and things. L’Hopital, Choelsky, Pythagoras, Euclid. Euler has a constant named for him, which is totally irrational but quite transcendent. In statistics, there’s Mr. Student, and Cramer (who I think is different from he Cramer of Cramer’s rule and Cramer on TV), Kendall, Pearson. I’m embarrassed that I am forgetting the name of the guy who invented Regression (Edit: Galton.) Also Fermat and that theorem, and Fourrier. The Germans might have Gauss, but it does seem that the French have piled up a ton of contenders.
Was Bill Sharpe a mathematician? Or is he just an honorary one. Paul Samuelson is probably also honorary. Einstein would definitely be honorary. Paul Samuelson too.
It’s true that I don’t think I could name many eastern mathematicians, although Bose and Chandrakhar are so mathematical that they probably would get guest status.
Fields Medal or hacksaw.
While in the shower I remembered some of the computer guys: Boole, Babbage, Turing.
There was also Nash.
Finally, Kepler is remembered as an Astronomer, but most of what he actually did was mathematics and geometry.
Einstein is remembered as a physicist, but the theory of General Relativity is nothing but mathematics derived more or less from first principles. And I believe he invented some matrix algebra to do it too.
Flowing water sure loosens up the mind.
Bhāskara was the one who declared that any number divided by zero is infinity and that the sum of any number and infinity is also infinity. It made my calculations a lot easier in school.
Archimedes of Syracuse is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Generally considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time. Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying concepts of infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems, including the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, and the area under a parabola.
Wasn’t Bertrand Russell a mathematician?
And Will Hunting?
Ah yes, entropy. … the inevitability of disorder. You would be into that 
Bertrand Russell was a mathematician but he was more of a philosopher… Not sure if will hunting was the real name.
Many philosophers were mathematicians in disguise.
Russell, Gödel, Leibniz, Descartes, . . . .
The Fields Medal is the highest scientific award for mathematicians, and is presented every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, together with a prize of Canadian dollars.
But what about Aristotle? They didn’t have these awards.