Best all time mathematicians/physicists.

[Bosonichadron]

Aristarchus...Copernicus basically took over his ideas on planetary motion and the heliocentric modell.

I would name Ptolemaeus as the worst physicist ever...
Gauss is the best mathematician...

regards
marlon

Marlon,

I appologize if I offended you in any way. It was not my intention to ridicule your opinion, as I may have come off. Gauss was a great mathematician, and a fine choice.

BH

 

[Bosonichadron]

And of course, you are entitled to your own opinion. What a shame you thought Marlon didn't.

If we are going to ridicule each others opinions, I might as well state that it is foolish to put Heisenberg and Schrödinger and Einstein second to Richard Feynman, who was a genius who came up with the path integration formulation, QED and Feynman diagrams, yes, but is far better known for his problem solving skills and fresh personality. I would put Special/General Relativity, Matrix and Wave Mechanics (Foundations of Quantum Mechanics) as better contributions.

Not to mention, Neils Bohr may be the most overrated physicist in history, and Marie Curie receives far more acclaim than she deserves, most likely because she was one of the few female physicists of the time. She, along with her husband who never seems to receive anywhere near as much credit, discovered two radioactive elements. She didn't make any discoveries about radioactivity, she isolated two elements. I don't even know the persons name who first isolated Oxygen!

In my opinion, which I'm sure many will disagree with, Marie Curie did not deserve two Nobel prizes, one for studying the previous discovered phenomenon of Radioactivity (which I don't believe she actually got any groundbreaking results from, what do they give Nobel prizes out for...) and another for Isolating Radium and Polonium.

As far as Neils Bohr and Marie Curie goes, I must admit that I agree; honestly, I just didn't want to seem sexist by leaving her off (she did, after all, receive two noble prizes in a period of history much more sexist than our own, and to leave her off may have looked bad).

And I like the path integration of Quantum Mechanics (over Feynman's other contributions) because it seems to remedy the "layers" of theory in physics (philosophically, anyway, if not practically). But I see your point.


--Bosonichadron

P.S. Thank you for point out my possible insult to Marlon.

 

[cragar]

1. Einstein
2. Newton
3. paul dirac
4. fermi
5.pauli

 

[CRGreathouse]

What!? Gauss the best!?

While I have to admit that Gauss was good, Euler was far better; As he is indisputably the most prolific mathematician of all time.

Pauca sed matura.

Euler was more prolific than Gauss, and I have always enjoyed the story of the productivity of Euler after going blind. But I must agree with Marlon: Gauss was the greatest mathematician of all time. Modular arithmetic, quadratic reciprocity (I can't remember how many proofs he had), the FFT 150+ years ahead of its time, additive number theory, the fundamental theorem of algebra, etc. As an amazing calculator, he made great strides with least squares, the normal distribution, and other statistical methods.

 

[csprof2000]

I always liked Lagrange. Probably not one of the best of all time, but his stuff has a nice, clean feel to it.

 

[maze]

Gonna throw Hermann Grassmann out there. Out of nowhere the guy singlehandedly invented linear algebra in his dissertation - the concept of a vector space, linear independence, subspace, span, dimension, projection onto a subspace, etc - things way ahead of his time. He also invented the exterior algebra and quaternions before "abstract algebra" was even a field of math.

Grassmann's work was treated with great suspicion by contemporaries. His phd advisor Mobius failed him, so he left math and spent the rest of his years studying linguistics. It wasn't until 30-40 years later that people took another look at his work, realized what he had created, and started to cite him.

 

[epenguin]

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

He didn't even know it himself!

 

[Werg22]

Pauca sed matura.

Euler was more prolific than Gauss, and I have always enjoyed the story of the productivity of Euler after going blind. But I must agree with Marlon: Gauss was the greatest mathematician of all time. Modular arithmetic, quadratic reciprocity (I can't remember how many proofs he had), the FFT 150+ years ahead of its time, additive number theory, the fundamental theorem of algebra, etc. As an amazing calculator, he made great strides with least squares, the normal distribution, and other statistical methods.

Gauss reluctance to publish meant a huge part of his work didn't contribute to anything. Instead the results were collectively rediscovered. He was a great mathematician for sure, but not the greatest in terms of contributions.

 

[Ofey]

Feynman is my favourite. I still consider him being my main mentor in physics. He showed me what it's actually about. And I never got to meet him since he was dead before I was born. Pretty good considering he did it all from his grave?

 

[de_brook]

Gauss is usually referred to as the greatest mathematician in 17th centuries. Euler is referred to as greatest mathematical analyst up to this moment. Newton is referred to as the father of classical mechanics. From my own point of view, top three mathematician are,

1. J. Von neumann
2. David Hilbert
3. Cauchy( with over 700 articles written)

 

[Werg22]

Feynman is my favourite. I still consider him being my main mentor in physics. He showed me what it's actually about. And I never got to meet him since he was dead before I was born. Pretty good considering he did it all from his grave?

Feynman did not show you what physics is all about, he showed you his idea of what physics is all about. You then decided to adopt it. Just saying.

 

[Ofey]

Feynman did not show you what physics is all about, he showed you his idea of what physics is all about. You then decided to adopt it. Just saying.

Point taken. :shy:

 

[Freddy_Turnip]

Paul Dirac
Alan Turing

 

[CRGreathouse]

Gauss reluctance to publish meant a huge part of his work didn't contribute to anything. Instead the results were collectively rediscovered. He was a great mathematician for sure, but not the greatest in terms of contributions.

I have no argument there -- I even quoted his 'reluctance' quotation in my post (usually given as 'few, but ripe').

 

[ObHassell]

My favorite physicists are:
1. Newton-arrogant? yes. But he invented calculus and basically invented classical mechanics (not that it wasn't around before him, it's just he recognized it as "not-philosophy")
2. Richard Feynman- he's a brilliant man and I think he's hilarious
3. Galileo Galilei- I like him, he's a good guy
4. Maxwell- he's actually a mathematician, but he's more remembered for his physics contributions, he seemed to be a great guy too
5. Enrico Fermi- hilarious guy, brilliant too

My least favorite physicists are:
5. Copernicus- very intelligent, but he was a wimp...yeah they'd kill him if he had published his stuff earlier, but he stalled science by not putting it out there, not the most manly move.
4. Albert Einstein- sure he was great and his discoveries revolutionized physics, but he actually wasn't all that smart, I mean, I recognized the relativity of simultaneity halfway through high school after seeing a guy smack a sign and not hearing it for a second (I didn't give it a name, I just thought it was an interesting thought I had). I don't really have much of a rational reason why I don't like him, he just strikes me as a guy I wouldn't like I guess...
3. Michio Kaku- total idiot, he's a good writer and is good at explaining things, but he's a moron, he does junk science, like he's "looking for an equation about an inch long". YOU DON'T LOOK FOR AN EQUATION! YOU LOOK FOR THE REASON THAT SOMETHING HAPPENS OR AN IMPLICATION OF SOMETHING ELSE AND THEN YOU FIND AN EQUATION OR A SET OF EQUATIONS THAT DESCRIBE IT! Totally against what Feynman believed in, and Feynman has a Nobel and Michio Kaku has a following of science-buffs, you can't argue with that, well you can...just Feynman's belief in how to do science is much more rational.
2. Keppler- not because I think he's stupid or he did anything wrong, but because all of those educational videos my high school showed made him look like a creep.

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and my least favorite physicist of ALL time is...
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1. Aristotle- he believed that theories did not have to be proven or experimented with, he thought that if someone makes a claim and it is logically sound then it MUST be true...he gets Oden's Stamp of Stupidity.

okay...now that I've shook it up a bit, let's hear the controversy flow

 

[CRGreathouse]

Some of the top mathematicians:
Gauss
Euler
Euclid
Cauchy
Hilbert
Gödel

Runners-up (died young):
Ramanujan
Riemann
Eisenstein
Galois
Abel

 

[KnowPhysics]

In my list
Einstein
Euler
I added Einstein as first because no one would have ever imagined that some invisible atom is going to carry such a big energy but he revealed it. when ever i think this, i give big salute for the great physicists. I like Leonhard Euler for his best maths.

 

[Gib Z]

My favorite physicists are:
1. Newton-arrogant? yes. But he invented calculus and basically invented classical mechanics (not that it wasn't around before him, it's just he recognized it as "not-philosophy")
2. Richard Feynman- he's a brilliant man and I think he's hilarious
3. Galileo Galilei- I like him, he's a good guy
4. Maxwell- he's actually a mathematician, but he's more remembered for his physics contributions, he seemed to be a great guy too
5. Enrico Fermi- hilarious guy, brilliant too

My least favorite physicists are:
5. Copernicus- very intelligent, but he was a wimp...yeah they'd kill him if he had published his stuff earlier, but he stalled science by not putting it out there, not the most manly move.
4. Albert Einstein- sure he was great and his discoveries revolutionized physics, but he actually wasn't all that smart, I mean, I recognized the relativity of simultaneity halfway through high school after seeing a guy smack a sign and not hearing it for a second (I didn't give it a name, I just thought it was an interesting thought I had). I don't really have much of a rational reason why I don't like him, he just strikes me as a guy I wouldn't like I guess...
3. Michio Kaku- total idiot, he's a good writer and is good at explaining things, but he's a moron, he does junk science, like he's "looking for an equation about an inch long". YOU DON'T LOOK FOR AN EQUATION! YOU LOOK FOR THE REASON THAT SOMETHING HAPPENS OR AN IMPLICATION OF SOMETHING ELSE AND THEN YOU FIND AN EQUATION OR A SET OF EQUATIONS THAT DESCRIBE IT! Totally against what Feynman believed in, and Feynman has a Nobel and Michio Kaku has a following of science-buffs, you can't argue with that, well you can...just Feynman's belief in how to do science is much more rational.
2. Keppler- not because I think he's stupid or he did anything wrong, but because all of those educational videos my high school showed made him look like a creep.

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and my least favorite physicist of ALL time is...
.
.
.
.
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1. Aristotle- he believed that theories did not have to be proven or experimented with, he thought that if someone makes a claim and it is logically sound then it MUST be true...he gets Oden's Stamp of Stupidity.

okay...now that I've shook it up a bit, let's hear the controversy flow

Well, i'll take the lead. No objections to the favorites list, but some of your reasoning for the least favorites list leads me to think you are a layman of physics, amateur in many ways. If you think Einstein was not all that smart for recognizing something at an older age than you say you did, how about every physicist before him who did not formulate it at all? Or perhaps every single one of them felt it was intrinsically obvious as you say you do, and just never bothered to mention it? And on Michio Kaku. You are a fool to think that the "inch long" quote is his entire philosophy of physics. Obviouslly he merely said that to engage the target audience, which was definitely amateur physicists such as yourself.

The others are so obvious as to why your reasoning is odd, I will leave them.

 

[disregardthat]

And aristotle is probably one of the cleverest persons in history.

 

[cragar]

A couple more good mathematicians are Brooke taylor and Colin Maclaurin

 

[John Creighto]

I'm wondering where philosophy fits in here. Contributions to science and marth aren't always about solving problems sometimes it is about shifting paradigms be it putting the sun in the center of the solar-system (Copernicus), basing science on measurable properties instead of subjective descriptions (Galileo in The Assayer), representing motion on the Cartesian plane (Descartes), removing the absoluteness of time (Einstein), quantifying infinities (Cantor), exposing the naivety of set theory (Burchant Russell).

There is an inter-play here of both philosophers making important contributions to math and science and mathematicians\scientists proposing axioms with striking philosophical implications.

 

[Sycatech]

Al-Khwarizmi, father of algebra

 

[jonjacson]

In physics I have three favourites:

Newton, if you read his biography and his works (in both math and physics) carefully, and you are conscient of the date he wrote all this works, you realize that he had one of the most powerful minds all over the history.Behind him, Maxwell made an incredibly job. Everithing was under the ideas of Newton, and he made a revolution introducing the concept of field , the main idea of a lot of theories of the XX century, he broke the tendency of using force to solve everything and made a very beautiful theory.

And I don't forget his works on statistics, and other subjects, so for me one of the bests of the history for sure.

Finally Einstein, his general theory of relativity and the way he found it is absolute incredible for his time.

And in mathematics, I agree that Riemann achievements are impressive, his originality is wonderful.

Perhaps you have not talked so much about cantor, but he made for the first time in the history something clear with the infinite(a slippery concept for everybody during centuries), so I would put him in the list.

 

[trambolin]

So where is this list anyway? It has been 9 pages there must be one!

 

[lubuntu]

In physics( I don't know much about mathematians) in no particular order here are the ones I am most inspired by:

Feynman
Newton
Einstein
Dirac
Maxwell
Faraday
Hawking

Not necessarily the greatest in terms of contributions just the ones I happen to look at with a good deal of pure awe.

Honorable mention for:
Copernicus
Kepler
Tycho Brahe
Galileo

For there work in getting the ball rolling as it were.

 

[epenguin]

I could say there is something that awes me that distinguishes Dirac from the others mentioned.

I would have said so even if I were not reading as I am at the moment The Strangest Man, the biography of this brilliant scientist and miserable git.

Scientists are mostly ‘constitutionalists’: they discover the constitution of the universe, its structures and components, what it is made of and how that stuff behaves. Galaxies, stars, solar system, earth, rocks, atoms, particles. Then some of them are (or also are) dynamicists, starting with those structures in a certain state, retrodict or predict what they will do (including evolve into something else). Newton, Laplace, Einstein, Schrödinger, Pauling… But these dynamicists had to predict starting with what there is (or what there can be thought to be). They had to take the constituents of the world for granted.

Whereas Dirac was the first to predict a constituent of the world. Not because of some missing mass (Lavoisier) or energy (Pauli) or there was a gap in what there is, so fill it (Mendeleev). But what there had to be. An experimentally unknown particle, the positron, only because otherwise his equations were not nice. Something of a different nature from all the others it seems to me, that raised the game of understanding Nature.

(Summarised in the books as 'he predicted and a few years later that was found experimentally', the biog. cited gives the somewhat more tortuous real historical story.) Then he did it again for the magnetic monopole, jury still out. Then his theory showing electrons not just had, but had to have, spin is perhaps at nearly the same level.

Since then other particles constituting the world have been predicted to exist and found, maybe another soon. And I read that String Theories are at the same time dynamics and constitution inseparably – but Dirac was the first of the kind.

 

[disregardthat]

What about Abel?

 

[robert Ihnot]

Underestimated Mathematicians:

Well, since no one I've read has mentioned Cardan/Cardano--who confessed to cheating on the solution of the cubic, making him a difficult person to celebrate these touchy classroom days; I have to say he was as Ore has written, "The Gambling Scholar."

He published 130 works and his Ars Magna gave solutions to the cubic and quartic equations. (The quartic was solved by his student Ferrari.) He was aware of imaginary numbers, but was unable to develope a successful theory about them.

It can be argued that he deserves credit for the cubic, since he was the first to publish. (In those days there was considerble secrecy about methods, but such is a hinderence to mathematical progress.)

Furthermore his abjuct confessions were a method of gaining favor with the Vatican, and he was restored to favor by Pope Gregory X111, and received a lifetime pension.

Ore insists that Cardano was the first to intelligently expound on the theory of probability, a century ahead of Pascal and Fermat.

 

[robert Ihnot]

I think it somewhat rediculous that Newton, because he was considered a Physicst, is generally ignored as a mathematician, when he was at the very top.

"Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Newton's contemporary and a philosopher/mathematician in his own right who found himself at odds with Newton, told the Queen of Prussia that "In mathematics there was all previous history, from the beginning of the world, and then there was Newton; and that Newton's was the better half."

Newton did hold the Lucaisian chair of Mathematics, and deserved the title of "Mathematican." He worked out the binominal theorem for small fractions, and found the Taylor series for sins and cosigns among his other acievements. Also, today noted by students for his method of root location, sometimes called "Newton's iteration".

 

[mikeph]

I really don't know enough maths to comment on the level that some others have (read pages 1-4 and there is a lot of knowledge on those pages!), but my personal favourite came from Archimedes, his work to find pi without any tools that we have today was very impressive to me.

From physics I like Feynmann's totally conceptual approach. For top people, I have always thought Gauss and Euler simply because in almost every module I took there would be some link to one of these people.