Birthday Index-National Curve Bank

Back to . . .

Birthday Index and Reference List
for the
History of Mathematics

	January
Jan. , 1526	Rafael Bombelli
Jan. 2, 1940	S, R, S, Varadhan
Jan. 7, 1871	Emile Borel
Jan. 8, 1888	Richard Courant
Jan. 10, 1938	Don Knuth
Jan. 14, 1902	Alfred Tarski
Jan. 15, 1850	Sonya Kovalevsky
Jan. 22, 1880	Frigyes Riesz
Jan. 23, 1862	David Hilbert
Jan. 25, 1736	Lagrange
Jan. 25, 1870	Koch
Jan. 27, 1832	Charles Dodgson, a.k.a., Lewis Carroll

	February
Feb. 7, 1877	G. H. Hardy
Feb. 7, 1883	E. T. Bell
Feb. 11, 1839	Josiah Willard Gibbs
Feb. 12, 1809	Abraham Lincoln
Feb. 14	Cardioid
Feb. 15, 1564	Galileo
Feb. 19, 1473	Copernicus
Feb. 20, 1931	John Willard Milnor
Feb. 21, 1591	Girard Desargues
Feb. 22, 1732	George Washington
Feb. 23, 1855	Gauss-Heptadecagon
Feb. 28, 1925	Louis Nirenberg

	March
Mar. 3, 1845	Cantor
Mar. 5, 1574	Oughtred
Mar. 6, 1896	Nikola Obreshkoff
Mar. 11, 1780	Crelle
Mar. 13, 1925	John Torrence Tate
Mar. 14, 1879	Einstein
Mar. 16, 1846	Mittag-Leffler
Mar. 18, 1928	Lennart Carleson
Mar. 21, 1768	Fourier
Mar. 21, 1884	Birkhoff
Mar. 23, 1749	Laplace
Mar. 23, 1882	Noether
Mar. 23, 1913	Paul Erdös
Mar. 25, 1537	Clavius
Mar. 26, 1773	Bowditch
Mar. 31, 1596	Descartes

	April
Apr. 1, 1776	Sophie Germain
Apr. 2, 1934	Paul Cohen
Apr. 3, 1909	Stanislaw Ulam
Apr. 5, 1588	Thomas Hobbes
Apr. 9, 999	Pope Sylvester II
Apr. 11, 1953	Andrew Wiles
Apr. 13, 1743	Thomas Jefferson
Apr. 14, 1629	Huygens
Apr. 15, 1707	Euler
Apr. 23, 1858	Max Planck
Apr. 28, 1906	Kurt Gödel
Apr. 29, 1854	Poincaré
Apr. 30, 1777	Gauss

	May
May 1, 1924	Evelyn Granville
May 1, 1926	Peter D. Lax
May 5, 2005	US Stamp: McClintock, Gibbs, von Neumann, and Feynman
May 11, 1918	Richard Feynman
May 12, 1820	Florence Nightingale
May 16, 1718	Agnesi
May 18, 1048	Omar Khayyam
May 18, 1872	Bertrand Russell
May 31, 1929	John Kemeny

	June
June, ca. 624 BC	Thales of Miletus
June 5, 1882	John Keynes
June 6, 1556	Sumario Compendioso
June 8, 1625	Cassini
June 9, 1885	Littlewood
June 13, 1831	James Clerk Maxwell
June 13, 1928	John Nash
June 14, 1917	Atle Selberg
June 16, 1839	Julius Petersen
June 19, 1623	Pascal
June 21, 1781	Poisson
June 23, 1912	Turing
June 27, 1806	DeMorgan

	July
July 1, 1646	Leibniz
July 2, 1906 July 2, 1852	Hans Bethe William Burnside
July 12, 1895	Buckminster Fuller
July 15, 1930	Stephen Smale
July 18, 1635	Robert Hooke
July 27, 1667	Johann Bernoulli
July 31, 1704	Cramer

	August
Aug. 4, 1805 Aug. 4, 1909	Hamilton Saunders Mac Lane
Aug. 5, 1802	Abel
Aug. 8, 1931	Roger Penrose
Aug. 12, 1887 Aug. 12, 1930	Schrödinger Jacques Tits
Aug. 13, 1819	Stokes
Aug. 16, 1821	Cayley
Aug. 17, 1601	Fermat
Aug. 18, 1685	Taylor
Aug. 21, 1789	Cauchy
Aug. 27, 1858	Peano

	September
Sept. 3, 1845	J. J. Sylvester
Sept. 8, 1588	Father Mersenne
Sept. 11, 1890	Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes
Sept. 15, 1926	Jean-Pierre Serre
Sept. 17, 1910	Marshall Hall
Sept. 18, 1752	Legendre
Sept. 22, 262 B.C. ?	Apollonius
Sept. 30, 1913	S. Eilenberg

	October
Oct. 3, 1944	Pierre René Deligne
*Oct. 3, 1548**	Simon Stevin
Oct. 6, 1936	Robert P. Langlands
Oct. 6, 1813	Dedekind
Oct. 7, 1885	Niels H. D. Bohr
Oct. 13, 1932	John Griggs Thompson
Oct. 15, 1608	Torricelli
Oct. 16	Quarternion Walk Broom Bridge
Oct. 25, 1811	Galois
Oct. 31, 1992	Galileo's Absolution

	November
Nov. 2, 1815	Boole
Nov. 9, 1731	Banneker
Nov. 17, 1717	d'Alembert
Nov. 17, 1790	Möbius
Nov. 19, 1831	President J. Garfield
Nov. 23, 2004	Calculating Record
Nov. 23, 1616	Wallis
Nov. 26, 1894	Wiener
Nov. 30 (death)	Cavalieri
Nov. 30 (St. Andrew's Day)	John Napier

	December
Dec. 1, 1792	Lobachevsky
Dec. 10, 1896	Nobel's death is honored.
Dec. 11 ?	Archimedes honored.
Dec. 13, 1557 (death)	Niccolo Tartaglia
Dec. 14, 1546	Brahe
Dec. 17, 1706	Châtelet
Dec. 17, 1842	Lie
Dec. 22, 1887	Ramanujan
Dec. 25, 1642	Newton
Dec. 26, 1891	Babbage
Dec. 27, 1571	Kepler
Dec. 28, 1903	von Neumann

Other People and Dates:

Euclid, Madhava (#1), Madhava (#2), Pythagoras, and the seasonal topics of New Years Day, Valentine's Day, Summer Solstice, Natural Logarithms, the Metric System, All Saints' Day, Winter's Day, Hella & SI Units, and New Year's Eve each have a "pop-down" screen appearing at an appropriate time or on a selected date. We commemorate Galileo's first astronomical observations and founding of the Royal Society of London.

We have also added three examples of curve sketching, e.g., the isolated "hermit" point, a node, and a cusp. Other October pop-down screens celebrate International Metric Week. Raphael, the high Renaissance artist, is included. The NCB enjoys the mathematicians he portrayed in the Vatican's School of Athens.

The NCB appreciates additional suggestions.

Classics, Favorites of Students, and Indispensable Texts

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/BiogIndex.html

Agrawala, V. S., ed., Vedic Mathematics, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1995.

Barrow-Green, June, Poincaré and the Three Body Problem. American Mathematical Society, 1997.

Bell, E. T., Men of Mathematics. Simon and Schuster, 1965.

Boyer, Carl B., A History of Mathematics, Princeton University Press. [1968 ed. is preferred.]

Burton, David M., The History of Mathematics: An Introduction. McGraw Hill, 5th ed., 2003.

Calinger, Ronald, ed., Vita MATHEMATICA. Mathematical Association of America, 1996.

Dunham, William, Journey Through Genius, John Wiley, 1990.

Eves, Howard, An Introduction to the History of Mathematics, Saunders College Publishing, 6th ed., 1990.

Edwards, C. H., Jr., The Historical Development of the Calculus. Springer-Verlag, 1979.

Fauvel, John and Gray, Jeremy, The History of Mathematics: A Reader. Macmillan and The Open University, 1987.

Grattan-Guinness, The Fontana History of Mathematical Sciences. Fontana Press, 1997.

Karpinski, Louis C., Bibliography of Mathematical Works Printed in America through 1850. University of Michigan Press, 1940.

Katz, Victor J., A History of Mathematics: An Introduction. Addison-Wesley, 2nd ed., 1998.

Simmons, George F., Calculus Gems: Brief Lives and Memorable Mathematics. McGraw-Hill, 1992.

Smith, David E., History of Mathematics, Dover, 1958.

Swetz, Frank J., From Five Fingers to Infinity: A Journey Through the History of Mathematics. Open Court, 1994.

Swetz, Frank J., "Some Not So Random Thoughts About the History of Mathematics - Its Teaching, Learning and Textbooks". PRIMUS, V(2) pp. 97 - 107, June, 1995.

Pierpont, James, "The History of Mathematics in the Nineteenth Century," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 37 (1) pp. 9 - 24. Electronically published on December 21, 1999 as a tribute to the millennium.

From our earliest dated copy of Euclid's Elements to the color coded 1847 Byrne edition, the most famous proof of the Pythagorean Theorem is ( I, 47 ).

Einstein:	Einstein was born on 3/14 and is thus remembered as " p."
George Washington:	President Washington was born in 1732 and is thus remembered as ~ 1.732.
Andrew Jackson:	President Jackson served two terms, was the seventh president of the U.S. and was elected in 1828. He is remembered as e= 2.71828.
Others ? If you know another, please add to our collection.