For some, it consists of four operations, and for others it is the most important concept that serves to define the world in every way. Many of the following names have not only dealt with mathematics, there are physicists among them who are engaged in philosophy. But they all left their mark on the history of mathematics.
We bring you 10 names from the most important mathematicians in the history of the world with the Eslem Caner selection.
1- THALES (640-548)
B.C.) Thales of
Milas was the first student of the Egyptian school of mathematics. He is a great mathematical scholar and philosopher. He is the oldest and most famous of the seven great scholars who lived before Jesus.
He solved the problem of drawing a triangle in a circle. He confirmed the equality of the opposite angles. The properties of triangles and Thales relates were used to find the height of the pyramids in Egypt.
He was not very attached to ancient Greek mathematics. Thales, Pythagoras, and Euclid brought a new teaching method and different rules to Greek mathematics.
2- PISAGOR (596-500 BC)
“The ruler of the universe is the number. Numbers rule the universe.”
The author of these words, +Pythagoras of Samos, is presumed to have been born around 596 before Jesus. He is a Greek philosopher and mathematician. Escaping the political pressures that prevailed in his country, he came to the city of Kroton in the south of Italy and gained fame by opening his famous school there.
Unable to digest the innovations, inventions and lights that Pythagoras wanted to bring in mathematics, physics, astronomy, philosophy and music, a number of political and religious bigots rebelled against Pythagoras and set fire to his school, and Pythagoras and his students died in this school in the years 500 B.C. amid flames. Many of the works of Pythagoras and his disciples perished in these flames.
In geometry, axioms and postulates must come first. The mathematician Pythagoras was the first to find and apply the idea that results should be obtained by using these axioms and postulates. It was Pythagoras who brought axiomatic thinking and the idea of proof to mathematics. The invention of the multiplication table and its application to geometry was again made by Pythagoras.
Pythagoras’ famous theorem, which has kept his name alive for 2,600 years and made him famous, is this: In a right triangle, the sum of the areas of the squares built on the right sides is equal to the area of the square built on the hypotenuse. Pythagorean theorem shows that length also exists, which cannot be measured by rational numbers.
Before Pythagoras, in geometry, what was obtained without showing the allegiances between shapes were a set of rules based on custom and experience. Whatever an official who came before said, it went on and on. That is why it is so important that Pythagoras introduced the idea of proof into mathematics.
3-ARCHIVE (287-212 B.C.)
Archimedes, son of the astronomer Fidiyas, was born in 287 BC in the city of Syracuse, on the island of Sicily. He is a relative of King Hieron II. Therefore, he had the opportunity to devote his time to knowledge without having a shortage of money. His astronomer father, who noticed his intelligence in time, guided him at a very early age.
Archimedes is regarded as one of the three great mathematicians who have come and gone from the world. These are, respectively, Archimedes, Newton, Gauss.
Archimedes had a keen interest in applied sciences. Just like Newton and Hamilton, he wouldn’t even forget their food when he was immersed in their calculations. He was a self-centered minder, a relinquishing mindset, not seeing anyone.
He was the first to calculate the area of the circle, the length of the circle, the area and volume of the sphere. The calculation of the number pi belongs to him again. He introduced the method of finding the areas confined by the most complex curves and the volumes of surfaces. He applied this method to find the surfaces and volumes consisting of circles, spheres, parabola fragments, the area between the two consecutive radii and two rings of the helix, spherical parts, rotation of rectangles, triangles, parabolas, hyperbolas and ellipses around the prime axis.
Archimedes, who lived about 2,000 years before Newton and Leibnitz, found the integral calculus and used the differential account they found in one of their problems. This is the “infinitesimals account”.
The most complicated time of Archimedes’ life coincides with the last days, the Punic wars between the Romans and the Carthaginians between 264 and 146 BC.
On one occasion, Archimedes was trying to solve a problem with the shape he had drawn on the ground. A Roman soldier marched on the figure, angering Archimedes. “Oh, don’t touch my apartment,” Archimedes said, plunging back into his problem.
Yet another time, Archimedes told the soldier who had ordered him to follow him to Marcellus, the Chief of Rome, that he would not leave until he had finished the problem. Angered by the long time to solve the problem, the soldier drew his sword, murdering the seventy-five-year-old old and unarmed geometrics in 212 B.C.
4- EUCLID (300 B.C.)
Of all the mathematicians of all time, Euclid is the person whose name is most associated with geometry. He owes his place in the world of geometry to the fact that he collected what was known until his own time in books called “Elements”. Items have been translated from language
to language, copied hundreds of times, and revised and reprinted thousands of times after the invention of the printing press. To ensure that the Euclidean compilation is a coherent whole, he puts forward five axioms.
It passes through two points only one line.
A piece of line can be extended in both directions without limitation.
A circle can be drawn, given its center and a point on it.
One and only one parallel can be drawn from a point taken outside a line.
All right angles are equal to each other.
The items consist of thirteen books. Euclidean geometry remained unrivaled until the 19th century.
5- HAREZMI (780-850)
This great scientist, whose full name was Muhammad bin Musa al-Khwarazmi, was born in Khorasan. He is the founder of today’s algebra and trigonometry. He is the mathematician most used in Europe.
He wrote numerous works on algebra. Until Descartes, it was the Khwarizmi and Khwarizmi algebra that dominated the western scientific world. For this reason, Khwarizmi is a world-class mathematician. His most important work is “Algebra and Comparative Calculus”. There are experiments, books of latitude and longitude, and a sky atlas. It was Khwarizmi who introduced Indian mathematics to the world.
6-DESCARTES (1596-1650)
Rene Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye, near Tours, Fıransa, during the years when Europe was being dragged into war. Descartes, a nobleman, soldier and mathematician, broke new ground with his analytic geometry.
Descartes came from a noble family. His father was wealthy. A few days after Rene’s birth, her mother died. The talents of his father’s petty philosopher, Descartes, were revealed even at the school desk. He saw as baseless what had to be blindly believed and bound to, and he did not accept anything without proof. So he began arguing with the priests by way of proof. He doubted everything.
Separated from his friends, he moved to a secret house for two years and did research in mathematics. But when his friends found this place as well, he decided to go to war to achieve peace and tranquility. But here too, he could not find the peace he wanted. He went to Germany. He became interested in feasts, ceremonies and feasts. He returned to military service.
In the years when scholastic thought in Europe continued to dominate and the dark ages came to an end, they also accused Descartes of irreligion. His religious ideas and ideas were rationalist and quite simple. Because he grew up unhealthy and undersized, he lived in fear of death for years.
He stayed in the Netherlands for many years. He concluded his investigations into optics, physics, anatomy, embryology, medicine, astronomy, meteorology, and the rainbow. He looked at every event as a raw material and thought about making something new out of it. So it was very innovative.
In his fifties, who he thought had found some calm, he came across Christine, the King of Sweden. Nineteen-year-old Christine, who had learned everything she needed to know, and even more, hired Descartes as her tutor. Christine’s ruthless and inexhaustible work made her seven. The winter was cold, and Christine’s relentless work eventually fell ill. The doctor did not agree. He died on February 11, 1650.
Descartes established a new geometry and gave the birth of modern geometry.
7-MULLAH LÜTFİ
He was one of the famous mathematicians who lived in the 15th century, during the reigns of Fatih Sultan Mehmet and Beyazıd II. He became a student of Sinan Pasha and Ali Kuşçu and transferred the mathematical knowledge he learned from Ali Kuşçu to Sinan Pasha. Thus, Sinan Pasha learned mathematics through him. With the advice of Sinan Pasha, Fatih appointed Molla Lütfi as the director of his private library. In this way, Mullah Lütfi had the opportunity to learn different sciences from many valuable books. When Sinan Pasha was exiled to Sivrihisar by Fatih, Molla Lütfi went with his teacher and returned to Istanbul with his teacher after the accession of Sultan Beyazıd II to the throne. He worked as a madrasa teacher first in Yıldırım Beyazıd Madrasah in Bursa, then in Plovdiv and Edirne. Mullah Lutfi was prosecuted for accusations of irreligion by some people who could not withdraw him and was executed during the reign of Sultan Beyazid. Many people mourned his death, dates fell, and he was considered a martyr.
Mullah Lutfi’s works, most of which were in Arabic, did not fall out of hand until the 17th century. His book Taz’ifü’l-Slaughterhouse (On the Discovery of Two Layers of the Altar Stone) consists of two parts. In the first part, geometry topics such as square and cube recipes, multiplication of lines and surfaces, and making two layers are discussed. In the second part, the famous Delos problem is examined. It is understood that Mullah Lutfi learned about this problem from the work of Theon of Izmir. Theon of Smyrna, referring to Eratosthenes, the director of the library of Alexandria, writes that when a great plague epidemic broke out on the island of Delos, when the people applied to the priest of Apollo and asked what it would take to make this epidemic pass, the priest advised them to double the altar stone in the temple, thus creating a mathematical problem that could not be easily solved. When the architects failed to do so, they sought Plato’s help. Plato stated that the problems would be solved in a moderate proportion, not because the priest needed the altarstone, but after declaring that he intended to tell the Greeks that they neglected and despised mathematics. Mullah Lutfi wrote his work based on this story. In his book, he explains that doubling a cube does not mean adding another cube to it, but growing it eight times. Molla Lütfi classified about a hundred sciences in his work titled Kanunü’l Ulüm (Subjects of Sciences).
8-PASCAL (1623-1662)
Pascal was born in Clermont, France, on June 19, 1623. His father was a cultured man.
It was unfortunate for him to be contemporary with great mathematicians like Descartes and Fermat. Therefore, he shared the discovery of the theory of probabilities with Fermat. The idea of geometry, which made him famous as a “great boy,” was inspired by Desargues, who was less famous than he was. He devoted little time to mathematics as he was more interested in religion and philosophy.
Pascal was a child who developed very early. But he was quite weak in body. On the contrary, his head was very bright. Although he was very young, he began to deal with math problems day and night. His father, who was worried that his health would deteriorate, prevented him from studying mathematics for a while, but his behavior led Pascal more towards mathematics.
Without any help and without any reading of geometry, he proved at a very young age that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. Without reading any book before, he had proved many of Euclides’ propositions. Pascal had become a geometric in his own right.
Pascal, before the age of sixteen, in 1639, proved the most beautiful theorem of geometry. The famous English mathematician Sylvester named this great theorem of Pascal “Cat’s Cradle”.
Pascal wrote a work about sounds when he was eleven years old. At the age of sixteen, he wrote a work on conics, astonishing the famous Descartes. By the age of eighteen, he had found the calculator, which is now stored in the Paris industrial museum. In physics, he found Pascal’s laws about the weight of air, the equilibrium state of liquids, and their pressure.
Pascal did not see days without suffering and pain from the age of seventeen until his death, the age of thirty-nine. At the age of twenty-three, he suffered a temporary stroke. Indigestion, stomach aches, insomnia, half-napping and the nightmares of these pains made him seven. Even so, it still worked non-stop.
In 1648, he studied Toriçelli’s work and got ahead of him. He found that the pressure changes with height.
Pascal, under the influence of his sister, withdrew himself from world affairs and mathematics after 1654, sinking into the dark conservatism of Christianity.
On one night in 1658, Pascal, writhing from insomnia and toothaches, plunged into the elegant cycloid curve that many famous mathematicians dealt with, in order to forget his terrible pains, at a time dominated by pliers. He was so immersed in the cycloid that he forgot all his aches and pains. He worked on cycloid geometry for eight days.
The year is 1658… Apart from the short intermittent naps, he was tormented by his unrelenting severe headaches. He writhing with these pains for four years. He died in June 1662 at the age of thirty-nine. An autopsy revealed that the cause of their pain was due to a serious brain disease.
Pascal had established a new world of mathematics by establishing the theory of probabilities with Fermat. The Pascal triangle serves to find the coefficients in the binomial expansion.
9-NEWTON (1642-1727)
“I don’t know how everyone sees me. I see myself as a child who, while playing by the sea, stands in front of him a vast ocean of unexplored truth, and takes pleasure in finding a polished pebble or a beautiful oyster shell.”
This is how Isaac Newton, who had passed judgment on himself in the last years of his long life, was born in 1642 as the son of a family of farmers living in a castle in the town of Woolsthrope. Newton’s father, who is considered the greatest intelligent man of the English race, died at the age of thirty before the birth of his son. Little Newton, born prematurely to his mother, his mother said, was so tiny that he could even fit in a liter jar. Newton’s childhood was also not vigorous, vigorous and strong. Instead of having fun like his other friends, he created his own fun and games, and his brilliance appeared in them. Kites with oil lamps to scare the villagers at night, moving toys that he made himself and that worked quite beautifully, water wheels, a mill that really grinded wheat, work boxes and toys for his little girlfriends, paintings, sundials, a wall clock made of wood and really functioning, were all inventions he made at a very early age.
Newton, at the age of eighteen, was universally acclaimed, beginning with his year as a student at Cambridge. Two years after graduating from university, he was applauded by the scientific community and respected by the rulers.
He was timid, irritable, quick-tempered, and afraid of being met with objections. He printed his works only by the force of his friends who loved him. He would avoid criticism. He could not withstand the criticism of his work “Optics” and regretted writing this work. He did not publish his general law of gravity until 1687. For twenty years he developed this general theory of the law of attraction.
While attending school and preparing for Cambridge, Grantham was staying at the home of the village pharmacist, Mr. Clarke. There he found an old collection of books and read them devourly. He never married.
Newton’s laws of motion:
(Law of Inaction) If no force is exerted on an object, it remains motionless where it is, or if it is in motion, it moves along a line with a smooth motion, that is, at a speed with zero acceleration.
If the mass is m, the constant acceleration is a, and the force is f, it is constant as f = ma.
(Law of Effect and Reaction) Effect and reaction are equal and are two forces in the opposite direction.
When Newton was asked how he found these discoveries, he replied, with constant thought. Newton’s most important discovery was his discovery of differential and integral calculus. This is what made Newton one of the three great mathematicians in the world.
Newton entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in June 1661. Newton’s mathematics teacher, Isaac Barrow, was both a theologian and a mathematician. Brilliant in mathematics, Barrow admitted that his student was far ahead of him, and in 1669 he left the chair of mathematics and was replaced by Newton, the great genius of the unparalleled genius.
Between 1664 and 1666, from the age of twenty-one to twenty-three, he underwent very intensive work and kept his work secret for a long time. He graduated from the university in January 1664 and received his bachelor’s degree.
He fell ill while studying things about the Moon, around a comet and the Moon. He kept his conclusions a secret. Within these two years, he had discovered differential and integral calculus, discovered the general law of attraction, and experimentally analyzed white light. These were all things that had been found before the age of twenty-five. In a paper dated May 20, 1665, he published his method of giving the tangent and curvature at a point on a curve when he was only twenty-three years old. This heralded the invention of the
differential. At this time, he was approaching the famous infinitesimal account. Also around this time, he had invented the binomial formula.
On his return to Cambridge in 1667 Newton was appointed a member of Trinity College, and was now unrivaled. In 1668, he built the reflective telescope alone and used it to study satellites. When he started writing his “Philosophy Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, he worked day and night. He put forward the famous perturbation theory. This theory was later advanced and applied to the orbits of electrons, and the planet Neptune was discovered in the nineteenth century and the planet Pluto was discovered in the twentieth century.
Newton, who had been without sleep and food for eighteen months to write the Princibia, was nearing his fifties. After this exhaustion, he fell very ill in the autumn of 1692. His disgust with food and constant insomnia almost drove him crazy. He spread all over Europe, where he was seriously ill. Even his enemies were delighted that he was later healed.
Newton was commissioned to print money at the mint in 1696 at the age of fifty-four. From 1701 to 1702, he represented the University of Cambridge in parliament. In 1703 he was elected president of the Royal Society. He remained in this position until his death. In 1705 he was honoured with the rank of knighthood by Queen Anne.
In 1696, Bernoulli and Leibnitz challenged European mathematicians with two questions. Newton first heard about the problems, which had been reintroduced after six months of hard work, from a friend when he returned home tired from the mint on the evening of January 29, 1696. That night he solved both problems. The next day, he anonymously sent both solutions to the Royal Society. Seeing the solutions, Bernoulli immediately said, “Here! I recognized the lion by his paw,” he exclaimed.
Even in 1716, when he was seventy years old, his intellectual structure was quite vigorous. Meanwhile, Leibnitz was again challenging European mathematicians with a problem he had raised. Newton picked up the problem at five o’clock on his evening return home from the mint. Although he was very tired, he immediately found the solution to the problem that evening.
Newton was the only mathematician who spent the many years he lived in the most happy way and saw the results of his deeds, who was admired and applauded with fame and glory. He suffered the last three years of his life from kidney stone disease, which he caught in a lot of pain and suffering. As he neared his death, he also contracted a cough. Within a few days he had reached a comfort of not feeling suffering and suffering. On the morning of March 20, 1727, between one and two, this giant light of science went out.
10- Gelenbevi Ismail Efendi
Gelenbevi İsmail Efendi, who was born in 1730 in the town of Gelenbe in Manisa, was one of the mathematicians of the Ottoman Empire. He received his first knowledge from the scholars around him, and then he went to Istanbul to complete his education. Here, he has greatly advanced his knowledge of mathematics. He became a governess at the age of 33 by winning the mudarris exam. After that, he devoted himself completely to knowledge and continued his studies.
Gelenbevi was the last Ottoman mathematician to solve problems with the old method. Upon the requests of Grand Vizier Halil Hamit Pasha and Kaptan-ı Derya Cezayirli Hasan Pasha, he was appointed as a mathematics teacher at the Naval Engineering School opened in Kasımpaşa with sixty kurus. This appointment brought him a comfort in monetary terms. A story is told about him: ‘The fact that some weapons did not hit the target angered Sultan Selim III and then called Gelenbawi to his presence and warned him. Gelenbevi then made the necessary corrections to the weapons by estimating the distances to the target and ensured that the cannons hit the target. This success of Gelenbevi attracted the attention of the sultan and was rewarded.
Gelenbevi left thirty-five works in Turkish and Arabic. It was Gelenbevi İsmail Efendi who first brought logarithm to Turkey.
