5 Great

Mathematicians
 Isaac Newton
 Carl Gauss
 John von Neumann
 Alan Turing
 Benoit Mandelbrot
Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, considered by many to be the greatest

scientist of all time. There aren't many subjects that Newton
didn't have a huge impact in — he was one of the inventors of
calculus, built the first reflecting telescope and helped establish
the field of classical mechanics with his seminar work,
"Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica." He was the
first to decompose white light into its component colors and
gave us the three laws of motion, now known as Newton's
laws. (You might remember the first one from school: "Objects
at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in
motion unless acted upon by an external force.")
Carl Gauss

Gauss could easily be called the greatest mathematician ever.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was born to a poor family in Germany in 1777
and quickly showed himself to be a brilliant mathematician. He
published "Arithmetical Investigations," a foundational textbook
that laid out the tenets of number theory (the study of whole
numbers). Without number theory, you could kiss computers
goodbye. Computers operate, on a the most basic level, using just
two digits — 1 and 0, and many of the advancements that we've
made in using computers to solve problems are solved using
number theory. Gauss was prolific, and his work on number theory
was just a small part of his contribution to math; you can find his
influence throughout algebra, statistics, geometry, optics,
astronomy and many other subjects that underlie our modern
world.
John von Neumann

John von Neumann was born János Neumann in Budapest a

few years after the start of the 20th century, a well-timed birth
for all of us, for he went on to design the architecture
underlying nearly every single computer built on the planet
today. Right now, whatever device or computer that you are
reading this on, be it phone or computer, is cycling through a
series of basic steps billions of times over each second; steps
that allow it to do things like render internet articles and play
videos and music, steps that were first thought up by von
Neumann.
Alan Turing

Alan Turing was a British mathematician who has been call

the father of computer science. During World War II, Turing bent
his brain to the problem of breaking Nazi crypto-code and was the
one to finally unravel messages protected by the infamous Enigma
machine. Being able to break Nazi codes gave the Allies an
enormous advantage and was later credited by some historians as
one of the main reasons the Allies won the war.Besides helping to
stop Nazi Germany from achieving world domination, Turing was
instrumental in the development of the modern computer. His
design for a so-called "Turing machine" remains central to how
computers operate today.
Bernoit Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot was born in Poland in 1924 and had to flee

to France with his family in 1936 to avoid Nazi persecution.
After studying in Paris, he moved to the U.S. where he found a
home as an IBM Fellow. Working at IBM meant that he had
access to cutting-edge technology, which allowed him to apply
the number-crunching abilities of electrical computer to his
projects and problems. In 1979, Mandelbrot discovered a set of
numbers, now called the described by science-fiction writer
Arthur C. Clarke as Mandelbrot set, that were "one of the most
beautiful and astonishing discoveries in the entire history of
mathematics." (To learn more about the technical steps behind
drawing the Mandelbrot set, click over to the infographic I
made last year for a class that I'm taking.)