It’s a good thing that we don’t live before 1900, because women were systematically pushed to the side, prevented from advancing, and stripped of credit for their achievements in all forms of science until after 1900, in fact through, um, let’s say September 1, 2024.
Source: every woman scientist who writes about her career.
Yep, that goes for people of color too, at least in white western science.
Emmy Noether should be on the list for her contributions in mathematics, especially her theorem describing the relationship between symmetries and conservation laws.
Claude Shannon, maybe right after Einstein. He invented digital electronics for his masters thesis. He invented information theory, and when I took it in grad school my professor said that subsequent work pretty much improved on his proofs. He also did early work on computer chess etc.
Better than von Neumann, though he certainly belongs on the list. His contribution to the stored program concept is a bit controversial, though he of course did other great things. And this opinion is despite the fact von Neumann is my academic grandfather - my first PhD adviser was his student at Princeton for his math PhD, and also worked for him at IAS.
I discovered when researching my chapter on computers that the reason for storing a program in memory was not to be able to write assemblers or compilers, but in order to index through an array without having to write instructions for each element. You just modified the address of the instruction. I never realized that despite having learned to program on a computer without index registers where I had to do the same hack.
Definitely. It seems to me we’re headed that way for people from the most recent 50 or so years as well, at least when it comes to big name scientific discoveries. Many of the historical giants have already been named earlier, but those mostly seem to be from the first half of the 20th century (and we could add the second half of the 19th century as well). But since then, there have been very few “big names” that would be immediately familiar to someone who has studied up to an undergrad level in math or the hard sciences. The only three names that come to mind off the top of my head are Watson and Crick for the structure of DNA and Hawking for black holes.
I absolutely agree with that.
Alexander Grothendieck (a name most of you probably haven’t heard of) was the most brilliant mathematician of the 20th century. He simply saw things in a different way from everyone else. He made difficult problems easy (once you learned his language) and impossible problems possible.
Speaking of brilliant minds who saw things differently, there’s Srinivasa Ramanujan - Wikipedia
Good catch. I knew of the guy but didn’t remember his name.
Much like Von Neumann, its a shame he died so young. Who knows what he could’ve contributed had he lived to old age. According to his wikipedia page, he was really only allowed to contribute to math for 6 years. No one took him seriously until about 1914, and he died in 1920.
This is why I was asking about 1900 and beyond. Had this man been born in the 14th century, he would’ve lived and died as a tailor or farmer.
It is a travesty that no one has named Cecil Adams.
Agreed. I you hadn’t mentioned him, I was about to. The first name that came to my mind.