Mathematicians

10 Dec 1815

Ada Lovelace

Mathematician who, in notes appended to a translation about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, described how such a machine might act on symbols rather than numbers — and wrote what is generally counted the first algorithm intended for a machine.

Xno birth time

4 Jan 1643

Isaac Newton

Set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation in the Principia of 1687, invented calculus in parallel with Leibniz, and spent rather more of his life on alchemy and biblical chronology than on either.

Xno birth time

22 Dec 1887

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Mathematician who arrived at thousands of results in number theory and infinite series with almost no formal training, working largely alone in Kumbakonam before Hardy brought him to Cambridge in 1914. He attributed his formulae to the goddess Namagiri. Notebooks he left at his death were still yielding new mathematics seventy years later.

Xno birth time