Euclid: Wrote the Elements, the foundation of geometry (about 300 BCE) Pythagoras: Greek thinker linked to the Pythagorean theorem (6th century BCE) Archimedes: Greek scholar who found area and volume of the sphere and estimated pi Eratosthenes: Greek scholar who estimated Earth's size and made a sieve for primes Thales: Early Greek geometer; the inscribed angle in a semicircle theorem Hypatia: Mathematician and teacher in Alexandria, about 400 CE Diophantus: Greek writer on equations, often called a father of algebra Aryabhata: Indian mathematician and astronomer (born 476 CE); worked on pi and sines Brahmagupta: Indian mathematician who gave rules for zero and negative numbers (628 CE) Al-Khwarizmi: Persian scholar whose book on equations gave us the word algebra; 'algorithm' comes from his name Omar Khayyam: Persian poet and mathematician who studied cubic equations Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa): Brought Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe; the Fibonacci sequence Zu Chongzhi: Chinese mathematician who found pi to about 7 digits (5th century) Liu Hui: Chinese mathematician who estimated pi with polygons (3rd century) Madhava: Indian mathematician who found infinite series for sine, cosine and pi (14th century) Ramanujan: Indian mathematician known for remarkable formulas and number theory (1887-1920) René Descartes: Created the coordinate plane linking algebra and geometry Pierre de Fermat: Number theory; Fermat's Last Theorem Blaise Pascal: Pascal's triangle and early probability Isaac Newton: Co-inventor of calculus; laws of motion and gravity Gottfried Leibniz: Co-inventor of calculus; the integral and derivative notation we use Leonhard Euler: Prolific Swiss mathematician; e, i, graph theory, Euler's formula Carl Friedrich Gauss: German 'prince of mathematicians'; number theory, the bell curve, 1 to 100 sum story Joseph-Louis Lagrange: Mechanics and number theory Pierre-Simon Laplace: Probability and celestial mechanics Sophie Germain: French mathematician who worked on primes and elasticity Évariste Galois: Showed which polynomial equations can be solved by formulas; founded group theory Niels Henrik Abel: Norwegian mathematician; proved the quintic has no general formula Bernhard Riemann: German mathematician; Riemann hypothesis, geometry of curved spaces Georg Cantor: Founded set theory; showed that some infinities are bigger than others David Hilbert: German mathematician who posed 23 famous problems in 1900 Henri Poincaré: French mathematician; topology and chaos Emmy Noether: German mathematician; abstract algebra and Noether's theorem Ada Lovelace: Wrote the first published computer program (1843) for Babbage's engine Charles Babbage: Designed early mechanical computers Florence Nightingale: Nurse who used statistical charts to improve health care Mary Somerville: Scottish science writer and mathematician (1780-1872) Maria Gaetana Agnesi: Italian mathematician who wrote an early calculus textbook Kurt Gödel: Showed math systems have true statements that cannot be proven (1931) Alan Turing: Founded theoretical computer science; broke wartime codes John von Neumann: Game theory and computer architecture Claude Shannon: Founded information theory Katherine Johnson: NASA mathematician who calculated orbits and flight paths Dorothy Vaughan: NASA mathematician and computer programmer Mary Jackson: NASA mathematician and the agency's first Black female engineer Grace Hopper: Computer scientist and Navy admiral; early programming languages Maryam Mirzakhani: Iranian mathematician; first woman to win the Fields Medal (2014) Terence Tao: Australian-American mathematician; Fields Medal in 2006 Andrew Wiles: Proved Fermat's Last Theorem (1994-95) Paul Erdős: Hungarian mathematician who wrote with hundreds of collaborators Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractal geometry John Napier: Scottish inventor of logarithms (1614) Robert Recorde: Introduced the equals sign in 1557 William Oughtred: Invented the slide rule; used × for multiplication George Boole: Boolean algebra, the basis of computer logic Carl Jacobi: German mathematician; elliptic functions and determinants Augustin-Louis Cauchy: French mathematician who made calculus rigorous Johannes Kepler: Astronomer and mathematician; laws of planetary motion Galileo Galilei: Italian scientist who used math to describe motion Thomas Bayes: English statistician; Bayes' theorem Karl Pearson: Founded modern statistics; the correlation coefficient G. H. Hardy: English mathematician who recognized Ramanujan's genius Hipparchus: Greek astronomer who began trigonometry tables Free flashcards from Peabody at peabody.kids/flashcards/math-mathematicians