Word Finder - mathematician

definition

An expert on mathematics.

Tobit ben Korra (836-901), born at Harran in Mesopotamia, an accomplished linguist, mathematician and astronomer, rendered conspicuous service by his translations of various Greek authors.

However, this approach will not create a skilled mathematician.

Giordano was distinguished both as a mathematician and an architect.

Euler's eulogium was enhanced by his desire to quit Berlin, d'Alembert's by his dread of a royal command to repair thither; and the result was that an invitation, conveying the wish of the "greatest king in Europe" to have the "greatest mathematician" at his court, was sent to Turin.

It might be said that Laplace was a great mathematician by the original structure of his mind, and became a great discoverer through the sentiment which animated it.

By his English contemporaries Barrow was considered a mathematician second only to Newton.

Ada Lovelace was not the only woman mathematician around at the time.

In his treatise on painting, da Vinci warns ' Let no one who is not a mathematician read my work '.

In his thirteen volume work Elements, the mathematician Euclid, referred to a dividing line at the point of 0.6180399.

Euclid of Alexandria, a famed mathematician of the time, wrote the influential thirteen volume textbook Elements.

Napier's priority in the publication of the logarithms is unquestioned and only one other contemporary mathematician seems to have conceived the idea on which they depend.

Clausius, to such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt; but it received enormous developments from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician.

Even before this, however, he had shown a strong inclination for natural science, and this had been fostered by his intimacy with a "self-taught philosopher, astronomer and mathematician," as Sir Walter Scott called him, of great local fame - James Veitch of Inchbonny, who was particularly skilful in making telescopes.

Mechanics (including dynamical astronomy) is that subject among those traditionally classed as "applied" which has been most completely transfused by mathematics - that is to say, which is studied with the deductive spirit of the pure mathematician, and not with the covert inductive intention overlaid with the superficial forms of deduction, characteristic of the applied mathematician.

One stirring social incident at least marked this part of his life, for, during the revolutionary insurrection in March 1848, the young mathematician, as a member of a company of student volunteers, kept guard in the royal palace from 9 o'clock on the morning of the 24th of March till 1 o'clock on the afternoon of the following day.

This memoir excited the admiration of Gauss, and at once marked its author's rank as a mathematician.

It was eagerly welcomed by the Berlin mathematician, who had the generosity to withhold from publication his own further researches on the subject, until his youthful correspondent should have had time to complete and opportunity to claim the invention.

In analytical invention, and mastery over the calculus, the Turin mathematician was admittedly unrivalled.

The earliest Indian mathematician of whom we have certain knowledge is Aryabhatta, who flourished about the beginning of the 6th century of our era.

Ganessa, an eminent astronomer, mathematician and scholiast of Bhaskara, quotes this work and makes separate mention of the cuttaca (" pulveriser "), a device for effecting the solution of indeterminate equations.

We have next to consider the works of Albert Girard, a Flemish mathematician.

The Opus Palatinum of Rheticus was published by Valentine Otho, mathematician to the electoral prince palatine, in 1596.

He visited Paris from time to time and established intimate relations with the abbe de Saint Pierre, the abbe Vertot and the mathematician Pierre Varignon.

Rudolf Snellius (Snel van Roijen, 15 4 6-1613), the mathematician, a native of Oudewater, then a professor at Marburg, happening at the time to visit his early home, met the boy, saw promise in him and undertook his maintenance and education.

About the same time Francesco Maurolico, or Maurolycus, the eminent mathematician of Messina, in his Theore y nata de Lumine et Umbra, written in 1521, fully investigated the optical problems connected with vision and the passage of rays of light through small apertures with and without lenses, and made great advances in this direction over his predecessors.

As a mathematician, he was the only Englishman after Sir Isaac Newton and Roger Cotes capable of holding his own with the Bernoullis; but a great part of the effect of his demonstrations was lost through his failure to express his ideas fully and clearly.

The early death of this talented mathematician, of whom Legendre said "quelle tete celle du jeune Norvegien!", cut short a career of extraordinary brilliance and promise.

He was far however from neglecting the science and art of war, for thus early he had begun to make his name as a theorist as well as a mathematician.

This extraordinary man, associated by tradition with Omar Khayyam, the well-known mathematician and free-thinking poet, and with Hassan (ibn) Sabbah, afterwards the founder of the sect of the Assassins (q.v.), was a renowned author and statesman of the first rank, and immortalized his name by the foundation of several universities (the Nizamiyah at Bagdad), observatories, mosques, hospitals and other institutions of public utility.

Though he never became either a scholar or a mathematician, he did enough accurate work to be placed in the honorary fourth class both in classics and in mathematics.

His various works give satisfactory evidence of his abilities as a theologian, mathematician, geographer, antiquary, historian and poet.

He was a great mathematician in an age which produced Descartes, Fermat, Huygens, Wallis and Roberval.

He was educated at Merton College, Oxford, where he took the degree of doctor of divinity, and acquired the reputation of a profound scholar, a skilful mathematician and an able divine.

Later on in life he migrated to Athens and continued his studies under Marinus, the mathematician, Zenodotus, and Isidore, the dialectician.

Maupertuis was unquestionably a man of considerable ability as a mathematician, but his restless, gloomy disposition involved him in constant quarrels, of which his controversies with Konig and Voltaire during the latter part of his life furnish examples.

He was a man of some property, and is spoken of on his tombstone as an excellent lawyer and mathematician.

Bacon was no mathematician, and so was out of touch with the main army of progress.

Lanfranc, Pope John XIV., Porta the anatomist and Cremona the mathematician were born in the city.

He is indeed taken by some authorities to be identical with the mathematician Bhaskara Acharya, who is known to 'have completed his chief work in A.D.

In all these fields of labour he made important contributions to science, and showed himself to be equally great as a mathematician and a physicist.

The invention of continued fractions is ascribed generally to Pietro Antonia Cataldi, an Italian mathematician who died in 1626.

His family, which was of Jewish extraction, had been settled in the Lyonnais for many centuries, and had reached distinction in the third generation before Frederic through Jacques Ozanam (1640-1717), an eminent mathematician.

As a mathematician Salmon was a fellow of the Royal Society, and was president of the mathematical and physical section of the British Association in 1878.

And he was no mathematician.

The ranks of scientists include the cosmographer Pedro Nunes (Nonius), a famous mathematician, and the botanist Garcia da Orta, whose Colloquios dos simples e drogas was the first book to be printed in the East (1563), while the form of Aristotelian scholastic philosophy known as Philosophia conimbricensis had a succession of learned exponents.

His powers as a mathematician were of the highest order.

Other buildings are the sheriff court house, and the Spence Library, founded by the widow of William Spence the mathematician.

This author, distinguished alike as a physiologist, mathematician and mechanician, describes and figures a bird with artificial wings, each of which consists of a rigid rod in front and flexible feathers behind.

Pratt was also a mathematician of some note.

The hair having by some unknown means disappeared, Conon of Samos, the mathematician and astronomer, explained the phenomenon in courtly phrase, by saying that it had been carried to the heavens and placed among the stars.