Let’s face it. Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Newton are a thing of the past. The world is full of math scientists who are discovering new and undiscovered things in 2022. And the list of accomplishments and interesting facts is just as long. Here are a few of them.
1. Keith Devlin — formerly a consulting professor at Stanford University. Now the mathematician has launched BrainQuake, a collaborative project that creates interactive video games. The goal of the apps is to make it easier to learn math in school and college.
2. Keith Devlin appears on NPR’s Saturday Weekend Edition program as a commentator. His nickname is “math guy.”
3. Terence Tao is a child prodigy hailing from South Australia. He is the youngest person ever to win the International Mathematical Olympiad. The participants in the Olympiad need to solve only 6 problems and algebra equations. The boy was only 10 years old when he had done all algebra solutions (the minimum age for participation is 20). He had no algebra problems, so the Nobel Prize was just a matter of time. And he got it.
If you want help with algebra — feel free to email Terence Tao, he encourages people to communicate with him on the topic.
4. Terence Tao is also the youngest professor at the university. At the age of 24, the scientist was appointed full professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
5. Ian Stewart is a gifted English mathematician. But, math solutions are not the only thing scientists are known for. Ian writes books for popular science and science fiction. He even has his own iOS app and a paper edition called Incredible Numbers by Professor Ian Stewart.
6. John Stillwell is known as a source of knowledge and an educational leader in the mathematical sciences. All the cool stuff he’s written is a compilation of the history of mathematics over 200 years. The rest are scientific books on scientific mathematics.
7. Bruce C. Berndt has spent his life researching analytic number theories. This is the main area of mathematics of integers and their properties. Bruce is an admirer of scientist Srinivasa Ramanujan the «prophet» of mathematics, discovered by talents in the United States after solving some of the world’s most difficult mathematical problems without a formal and extensive mathematical education. Bruce C. Berndt has been the editor of a journal about the scientist since 1997. The scientist has been writing about the scientist for more than 25 years.
8. Timothy Gowers, in addition to his outstanding work as a scientist and reading lectures for students, was also a consultant for the 2005 film «Proof», directed by John Madden. The film adaptation is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Auburn.
9. If you want chaos, you go to Peter Sarnak. This scientist invented a field called «arithmetic quantum chaos.» But, not all of his work is tied to chaos. Rather, it’s about solving it.
Sarnak was a hero. He did the work that solved the famous eleventh problem of the 19th-century scientist Hilbert. He published 23 problem theories in 1900, and only 16 were solved in 122 years of labor. A kind of, ice bucket challenge of the last century for the mathematicians of the present.
10. Professor Sir Martin Hirer was the only one to win the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics 2021. The recipient whose award was for «transformative contributions to the theory of stochastic analysis, in particular, the theory of regularity structures in stochastic partial differential equations.» If you are confused by 2-3 words, that’s okay.
11. Ingrid Daubechies is one of the few influential women mathematicians of the 20th-21st century. Ingrid founded the Duke Summer Mathematics Seminar, where promising female students learn more than just mathematics. Related lessons like computer academics and physics are also part of the course. You won’t get enough theories, but you have to teach your kids, too.
12. Andrew Wiles taught Fermat’s theorem. When he was ten years old. After that, his whole life became one quest to prove the centuries-old number theory hypothesis. In 1993, he proved the theorem. Its condition is formulated simply, on a «school» arithmetic level, but the proof of the theorem has been sought by many mathematicians for over three hundred years. What were you doing when you were ten years old?
13. Andrei Okounkov is known for his works on abstract algebra. His main works are in the area known as infinite symmetric groups. In 2006 he was awarded the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics, which is often compared with the Nobel Prize, which is not available to mathematicians. The Fields Medal is awarded to no more than four young scientists, no older than 40, and only once every four years.
14. You will read Fyodor Bogomolov’s name many times in this paragraph. He is one of the most famous names in geometry in the last 50 years. Have you heard about Bogomolov stability, Bogomolov-Miyaoka-Yau inequality, Bogomolov hypothesis, or Bogovil-Bogomolov form? I wonder if his life story will be published without Bogomolov in the title?
15. Jordan Ellenberg frequently attends lectures and seminars for mathematicians and the non-scientific community, and writes and publishes scholarly papers, and coursework. He is the author of the New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. The book explains the logic of mathematics and technical thinking to the general public. Ellenberg has also written a novel, The Grasshopper King. You can buy it and put it in your library.
16. Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb works in the world of images and differentials. She is a woman mathematician who analyzes not just equations, but visualization problems. If you watch movies, Carola-Bibiane is a set and problems of 3D and 4D visualization.
And the scientist’s scientific work influences worldviews in the fields of chemical engineering, biotechnology, and even art.
Mobile apps, talk shows, fixing problems in rendering movies and cartoons – what else are the mathematicians of the 21st century interested in? It’s not an apple to the head, or “Eureka.” Our scientists know hundreds of times more than their predecessors 200-300 years ago. And the next generations will know even more. And will make a new batch of interesting facts for you.
