who would you consider the 3 greatest mathematicians of all time

[thanatic]

of course these questions are always subjective, and math is such a diverse field…but if you had to give an answer…who would you list as the top 3 greatest mathematicians in history, in your opinion

[running_coach]

Nikolai Lobachevsky, the greatest who ever got chalk on his coat.

[TonySinclair]

Gauss and two other people.

[thanatic]

@TonySinclair

Gauss and two other people.

lol:D

[friedo]

How many times are you going to ask this?

[thanatic]

@friedo

How many times are you going to ask this?

i forgot about the other questions i have asked…that was back in april/may and i forgot alot…

the questions seem different from each other enough…so i dont see whats wrong

[Slow_Moving_Vehicle]

@friedo

How many times are you going to ask this?

Dude likes to talk about mathematicians and scientists. What’s the big deal?

[StusBlues]

I am a little surprised no one said Newton right out of the gate. As someone who never even took calculus, what am I missing here?

[F.U.Shakespeare]

@StusBlues

I am a little surprised no one said Newton right out of the gate. As someone who never even took calculus, what am I missing here?

Agreed. Without weighing in on the other two, I think the top three would have to include Newton.

[TonySinclair]

@StusBlues

I am a little surprised no one said Newton right out of the gate. As someone who never even took calculus, what am I missing here?

Newton is arguably the greatest physicist (or even scientist) of all time. He was certainly a great mathematician as well, but his contributions in physics probably saved the scientific world a generation or more, while his contributions in math may not have saved much time at all (Leibnitz invented calculus independently, about the same time as Newton, and his notation was the one that caught on).

[thanatic]

@TonySinclair

Newton is arguably the greatest physicist (or even scientist) of all time. He was certainly a great mathematician as well, but his contributions in physics probably saved the scientific world a generation or more, while his contributions in math may not have saved much time at all (Leibnitz invented calculus independently, about the same time as Newton, and his notation was the one that caught on).

yeah, newton would probably be the general, almost majority, consensus among scientists for “greatest physicist ever” and “greatest scientist ever”

Mathematics though is tricky…but if i remember isn’t traditionally the 3 greatest mathematicians are Archimedes, Gauss, Newton

[Marion_Wormer]

Gauss, Pascal, Laplace.

[zoid]

I admit I know nothing about math but Joseph Fourier gets at least one vote from me just because Fourier transforms blow my mind.

[Trinopus]

Roger Penrose deserves an honorable mention.

[Senegoid]

@StusBlues

I am a little surprised no one said Newton right out of the gate. As someone who never even took calculus, what am I missing here?

You needn’t knock yourself for never having taken calculus. Newton never took calculus either.

[the_diego]

Descartes
Newton
Von Neuman

[Gray_Ghost]

How about Euler? Or Ramanujan, though he gets a lot of credit from how he learned math—essentially self-taught, IIRC.

Then there’s Erdős

[yellowjacketcoder]

I was going to go Euclid (father of geometry), Euler (more things named after him than you can shake a stick at) and Fermat (proved an enormous amount of theorems).

I’m a bit miffed at myself for not thinking of Gauss (he probably deserved it more than Fermat), but I dismissed Newton as more of a Physicist than a Mathematician, Calculus aside.

[breezman]

I’d probably go with Newton, Euler, and Gauss. Hilbert and Cantor are up there too.

[vomit_comet]

@StusBlues

I am a little surprised no one said Newton right out of the gate. As someone who never even took calculus, what am I missing here?

Newton and Einstein were two choices preceded by Kepler.