Best all time mathematicians/physicists.

[God's Pen]

for me,there is no "best mathematicians" or "best physicians" i think they all make the best.

 

[robert Ihnot]

Gib Z I don't even know the persons name who first isolated Oxygen!

Priestly in 1774 extracted oxygen from mercuric oxide. He discovered that it caused a flame to burned very brightly, and a mouse could be kept alive 4 times as long in "dephlogisticated air" as in regular air.

Priestly traveled to France and met Lavaisier, who named the gas, "oxygen."

 

[wisvuze]

Faraday is one of the most interesting ones, I've heard that his mathematical knowledge went only up to trigonometry and algebra (and I don't mean linear/abstract)

 

[epenguin]

Gib Z I don't even know the persons name who first isolated Oxygen!

Priestly in 1774 extracted oxygen from mercuric oxide. He discovered that it caused a flame to burned very brightly, and a mouse could be kept alive 4 times as long in "dephlogisticated air" as in regular air.

Priestly traveled to France and met Lavaisier, who named the gas, "oxygen."

Priestly made those observations but is debated whether you should call him the 'discoverer' or rather Lavoisier who conceptualised them and others as 'oxygen'. If you don't know what you have discovered have you discovered it?

Remind me whether Columbus knew he had discovered America?

 

[robert Ihnot]

wisvuze: Faraday is one of the most interesting ones, I've heard that his mathematical knowledge went only up to trigonometry and algebra (and I don't mean linear/abstract)

If you want a name of someone who had very little understanding, and even contempt of math, it is Edison. Edison put it very simply,

"I hire mathematicians, they don't hire me."

PS: Edison had a detactor in Tesla who said, "His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calcuation would have saved him 90% of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense." Wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison.

 

[AakashR]

Ramanujan, Gauss, Newton, Riemann, Einstein

 

[JustGaussing]

Physics: Maxwell
Math: Euler, Gauss
But then again, I am not particularly good at either, so how would I really know? There are so many, and each stands on the shoulders of giants who came before.

 

[ilikemaths]

I have to second Lagrange, if for no other reason than he fits the bill so well having approached mechanics as a purely mathematical field. I read somewhere that he took enormous pride in not including a single diagram in his Méchanique analytique.

 

[lavster]

apparently there was a poll and Maxwell came out on top. in physicsworld or new scientist or something like that. I like Newton. he was one of the founders of calculus and he did his three laws of motion etc.etc. :)

 

[RoughRoad]

Ramanujan! This guy, with no formal education of any sort, did so much in this field in just 32 years!

 

[henglin]

best mathematician or physician? Thats comparing a top fuel dragster with a formula 1 race car.

But id say Newton (maths and physics)
Einstein(physics along with maths)
gauss
archimedes
liu hui
leibnitz

 

[Clu2.0]

feynmann, einstein, john nash and neumann

 

[micromass]

I'd like to add Euler, Hilbert, Godel, Grothendieck.

 

[Outlined]

in no particular order, here are some that come to mind off the top of my head:
- Hilbert
- Euler
- Erdos
- Gauss
- Archimedes
- Galois

i don't think i know enough physics to have an opinion about physicists. i guess you could go through the list of nobel prize winners to find a bunch of the best ever.

Erdos? No, would say von Neumann or Newton.

 

[snipez90]

Euler and Lebesgue, mainly because I'm partial towards analysts.

 

[ejnorman]

Saunders Mac Lane for discovering general abstract nonsense.

Haskell Curry for discovering why equals can be substituted for equals.

 

[HallsofIvy]

What?? 166 posts and no one has listed me yet??

 

[mathwonk]

We live and learn. Earlier in this thread I dissed Euclid but praised Newton for his limit definition of a derivative. Then in Fall 2009 I actually read Euclid and discovered that his description of a tangent line uses the limit definition (if you think about it, that is precisely what Proposition 16, Book III, Elements, says, in the epsilon delta version) and thus anticipates Newton by over thousand years. I then learned that Newton read Euclid shortly before coming up with his own definition. Newton has not gone down, but Euclid has gone up in my estimation. I now consider his geometry book the best available even today.

 

[camilus]

Newton
Archimedes
Riemann
Gauss
Euler
Ramanujan
Grothendieck

What do you guys think of Grisha Perelman? I think he's absolutely brilliant.

 

[epenguin]

We live and learn. Earlier in this thread I dissed Euclid but praised Newton for his limit definition of a derivative. Then in Fall 2009 I actually read Euclid and discovered that his description of a tangent line uses the limit definition (if you think about it, that is precisely what Proposition 16, Book III, Elements, says, in the epsilon delta version) and thus anticipates Newton by over thousand years. I then learned that Newton read Euclid shortly before coming up with his own definition. Newton has not gone down, but Euclid has gone up in my estimation. I now consider his geometry book the best available even today.

That is a motivation.

Sorry, but I find this thread irritating and pointless when people just give names or lists without reasons or motivations, criteria.

 

[mathwonk]

Yes, this is like a video game break from real work. But try not to be irritated when you are not required to look at it. Life is stressful if you go out of your way to be irritated.

 

[Outlined]

Newton
Archimedes
Riemann
Gauss
Euler
Ramanujan
Grothendieck

What do you guys think of Grisha Perelman? I think he's absolutely brilliant.

only dead ones would count I think

 

[widderjoos]

I think the people who had the greatest impact on physics are:

Galileo
Maxwell
Weyl
Einstein

For math:

Gauss
Hamilton
Riemann
(Emmy) Noether

for having important contributions (imo).

Personally, I admire Kitchen and Feynman who got me into math and physics through their writings.

 

[JonF]

IMHO George Cantor.

 

[mxbob468]

neumann for all that he contributed to and the lore surrounding him

 

[G037H3]

mathematics:

* Gauss
* Riemann
* Archimedes
* Euclid
* Euler
* PascalPhysics:

* Newton
* Maxwell
* Poincare
* Faraday

 

[mathwonk]

just to be annoying, i will suggest that if you mention someone, you should have actually read at least some of their own writings. if not, then perhaps, just perhaps, you do not know what you are talking about.

 

[zorro]

My favourite Mathematicians/Physicists-
1) Einstein
2) Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
3) Euclid
4) Omar Al-Khayyam
5) Alhazen
6) Sir Isaac Newton
7) Abu Rayhan Biruni
9) Ibn Sina

 

[cragar]

1. HallsofIvy

 

[P-Jay1]

I would say Leibniz! Galois is my favourite though. Check out these podcasts on the BBC radio 4 site, really good listening:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/maths

 

[camilus]

just to be annoying, i will suggest that if you mention someone, you should have actually read at least some of their own writings. if not, then perhaps, just perhaps, you do not know what you are talking about.

thanks mathwonk, you have been an inspiration throughout this entire thread. I honestly read through practically the entire thread several times and at disperse instances just because of the quality of your posts.

and to Outlined, only dead ones count in the debate of greatest of all time, I just wanted to incite a dicussion about Perelman and the current developments in topology. This is not yet my area of focus, but I plan on getting around to it, currently studying prime numbers and set theory. I need to study the geometrization conjecture a bit more, although I believe I understand the fundamental principles of topology.

Mathwonk, speaking of reading the masters in their own words, I was reading Riemann's 1859 paper (calling it that for lack of will to recall the German name), and I was wondering if you could recommend a good book in complex analysis specific for understanding the jump he made in end of page 2 and page 3 to derive the functional equation. Thanks

 

[Fil7]

Newton, Einstein, Gauss, Euler, Neumann, Feynman, Kelvin, Turing, Maxwell, Galilei, Hilbert, Poincaré, Majorana, Landau, Dirac, Faraday, Pedro Nunes (I'm portuguese), etc.

 

[cragar]

some more that I thought should be mentioned.
Gibbs, Boltzmann, Tesla, Wheeler, Hugh Everett,Eugene Wigner

 

[engphy2]

Pythagoras and Descartes