ProofWiki:Mathematicians/Sorted By Birth/1901 + CE

For more comprehensive information on the lives and works of mathematicians through the ages, see the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, created by John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson.

"The army of those who have made at least one definite contribution to mathematics as we know it soon becomes a mob as we look back over history; 6,000 or 8,000 names press forward for some word from us to preserve them from oblivion, and once the bolder leaders have been recognised it becomes largely a matter of arbitrary, illogical legislation to judge who of the clamouring multitude shall be permitted to survive and who be condemned to be forgotten."

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1901 - 1910

1901

Otto Schreier

1901 – 1929

Austrian mathematician who made great advances in group theory before dying unfortunately young of sepsis.
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Edouard Zeckendorf

1901 – 1983

Belgian doctor, army officer and amateur mathematician, best known for Zeckendorf's Theorem.
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Steven Vajda

1901 – 1995

Hungarian mathematician whose main work was in game theory and mathematical programming.
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Edward Thomas Copson

1901 – 1980

British mathematician best known for his textbooks in various fields.
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1902

Alfred Tarski

1902 – 1983

Name at birth: Alfred Teitelbaum.

Polish mathematician who worked in several fields of mathematics, in particular logic.

Most famous for the Banach-Tarski Paradox (with Stefan Banach) in 1924.
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Jovan Karamata

1902 – 1967

Serbian mathematician working in analysis.

Introduced what is now known as Karamata notation for Stirling numbers.
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1903

Frank Plumpton Ramsey

1903 – 1930

British mathematican most famous for founding the field of what is now called Ramsey Theory.
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Marshall Harvey Stone

1903 – 1989

American mathematician who contributed to real analysis, functional analysis, and the study of boolean algebras.
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Andrey Kolmogorov

1903 – 1987

Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Russian: Андрей Николаевич Колмогоров) was a Russian mathematician active in various fields, including probability theory, topology and intuitionistic logic.
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Alonzo Church

1903 – 1995

American mathematician who pioneered in the field of computability theory and the foundations of computer science.

Best known for his lambda calculus, Church's Theorem and Church's Thesis.
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Kurt Mahler

1903 – 1988

German mathematician working mainly in analysis and number theory.

Proved the Prouhet-Thue-Morse constant and Champernowne constant to be transcendental.
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Andrey Andreyevich Markov Jr.

1903 – 1979

In Russian: Андрей Андреевич Марков.

Soviet mathematician working in the fields of topology, mathematical logic and several others.

Son of Andrey Andreyevich Markov Sr.
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John von Neumann

1903 – 1957

Born Neumann János Lajos in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics, game theory, computer science, numerical analysis and statistics, to name but a few.

He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians in modern history.
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1904

Philip Hall

1904 – 1982

English mathematician active in the field of group theory.
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John Greenlees Semple

1904 – 1985

British mathematician whose most important work was in algebraic geometry.
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Ingebrigt Johansson

1904 – 1987

Norwegian mathematician and logician best known for inventing minimal logic.
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William Hunter McCrea

1904 – 1999

Known to his friends as Bill. Irish mathematician, physicist and astronomer who specialised in solar physics.
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1905

Derrick Henry Lehmer

1905 – 1991

Derrick Henry ("Dick") Lehmer was an American mathematician active mainly in the field of number theory.

Most famous for designing the Lucas-Lehmer Test for determining the primality of Mersenne numbers.

The son of Derrick Norman Lehmer, and married to Emma Lehmer, née Trotskaia.
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1906

Edward Maitland Wright

1906 – 2005

Sir Edward Maitland Wright was an English mathematician best known for co-authoring the 1938 work An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, with G.H. Hardy.
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Kurt Gödel

1906 – 1978

Austrian mathematician who emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1940.

Famous for his first and second incompleteness theorems.
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Max August Zorn

1906 – 1993

German-born American mathematician who worked in algebra, set theory and numerical analysis.

Best known for Zorn's Lemma, which he discovered in 1935. This is also known as the Kuratowski-Zorn Lemma, thereby acknowledging the work of Kazimierz Kuratowski who had published a version of it in 1922.
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Daniel Edwin Rutherford

1906 – 1966

British mathematician, known as Dan Rutherford, who mainly worked on abstract algebra, vector analysis and fluid mechanics, among various others.
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Alexander Osipovich Gelfond

1906 – 1968

Russian mathematician and prolific writer (Russian: Алекса́ндр О́сипович Ге́льфонд) best known for the Gelfond-Schneider Theorem.
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Andrey Nikolayevich Tychonoff

1906 – 1993

Russian mathematician (Russian: Андрей Николаевич Тихонов) best known for his work in topology.

His name is also frequently transliterated Tikhonov.
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Carl Benjamin Boyer

1906 – 1976

American historian of mathematics and science.
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Emma Markovna Lehmer

1906 – 2007

Emma Markovna Lehmer (née Trotskaia) was a Russian-born mathematician active mainly in the field of number theory.

The wife of Derrick Henry ("Dick") Lehmer, with whom she was a frequent collaborator.
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1907

Hassler Whitney

1907 – 1989

American mathematician who worked mainly in topology.
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Lars Valerian Ahlfors

1907 – 1996

Finnish mathematician noted for his work in analysis.
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Herbert Seifert

1907 – 1996

Full name: Karl Johannes Herbert Seifert. Sometimes reported as Herbert Karl Johannes Seifert.

German mathematician who worked mainly in topology and knot theory.

Collaborated extensively with William Threlfall.

One of the few who managed to weather the 2nd World War without upsetting either the Nazis or the Allies.
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Harold Davenport

1907 – 1969

English mathematician who worked mainly in number theory.
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1908

Morris Kline

1908 – 1992

American physicist, mathematics teacher, historian, and agitator for the teaching of the New Mathematics in schools.
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Willard Van Orman Quine

1908 – 2000

Legendary American philosopher and logician, known by his friends as Van.

Proposed three systems of axiomatic set theory.

The word quine was coined by Douglas R. Hofstadter in his classic 1979 work Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, in which what is now known as Quine's paradox was discussed at length.

The word quine is now used for a computer program whose output is itself.
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Lev Semenovich Pontryagin

1908 – 1988

Lev Semenovich Pontryagin (Russian: Лев Семёнович Понтрягин) made major discoveries, mainly in the field of geometric topology.
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Sergei Lvovich Sobolev

1908 – 1989

Sergei Lvovich Sobolev (Russian: Серге́й Льво́вич Со́болев) worked mainly in the fields of analysis and partial differential equations.
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1909

Stephen Cole Kleene

1909 – 1994

One of the great pioneers in the field of recursion theory.
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Bernhard Neumann

1909 – 2002

Full name: Bernhard Hermann Neumann.

German-born mathematician who was one of the leaders in the field of group theory.

Husband of Hanna Neumann and father of Peter M. Neumann.
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Gerhard Gentzen

1909 – 1945

Full name: Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen.

German mathematician and logician who made progress in symbolic logic.

Proved that the Peano axioms are consistent.
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1910

Cahit Arf

1910 – 1997

Turkish mathematician best known for his work in abstract algebra and algebraic number theory.
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Nathan Jacobson

1910 – 1999

Polish-American mathematician mainly working in abstract algebra.

Student of Joseph Wedderburn.

Known as Jake to his friends and colleagues.
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Charles Alfred Coulson

1910 – 1974

British mathematician whose main area of research was in applications to molecular physical chemistry.

Published widely in the field of applied mathematics.
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Helmut Wielandt

1910 – 2001

German mathematician whose main work was in group theory, especially permutation groups.
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1911 - 1920

1911

Garrett Birkhoff

1911 – 1996

American mathematician mainly working in mathematical physics and abstract algebra.

Also wrote plenty of text books: his Lattice Theory (1940) is much cited.

The son of George David Birkhoff.
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Walter Ledermann

1911 – 2009

German mathematician best known for his work in homology, group theory and number theory.
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Walter Warwick Sawyer

1911 – 2008

British mathematician best known for the books he wrote, especially Mathematician's Delight and Prelude to Mathematics.
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Theodor Schneider

1911 – 1988

German mathematician best known for providing a proof of the Gelfond-Schneider Theorem.
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Ernst Witt

1911 – 1991

German mathematician working mainly in the field of quadratic forms and algebraic function fields.
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Raphael Mitchel Robinson

1911 – 1995

American mathematician who worked on mathematical logic, set theory, geometry, number theory and combinatorics.

One of the early computer pioneers, he implemented a program for the Lucas-Lehmer Test and in 1952 determined or confirmed the primality of all the Mersenne numbers up to $M_{2304}$. In the process, he discovered the Mersenne primes $M_{521}, M_{607}, M_{1279}, M_{2203}$ and $M_{2281}$.
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1912

Hans Julius Zassenhaus

1912 – 1991

German mathematician who did significant work in abstract algebra, and also pioneered the science of computer algebra.
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Alan Mathison Turing

1912 – 1954

English mathematician who is often considered to be the "father of modern computer science".

Famous for his conception of the Turing machine and the Turing test.
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1913

Paul Erdős

1913 – 1996

In Hungarian: Erdős Pál. Hungarian mathematician known for the vast quantity of work he did (approximately 1500 papers).

Spent his entire life travelling the world looking for interesting mathematical problems to solve.

Perhaps most famous for his widespread collaborations (about 500 collaborators), from which the concept of the Erdős Number emerged.
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Israel Gelfand

1913 – 2009

Israel Moiseevich Gelfand or Israïl Moyseyovich Gel'fand was a Soviet and Russian mathematician who contributed considerably to many branches of mathematics, including group theory, representation theory and linear algebra.

Did much good work in the field of education.
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Andrzej Mostowski

1913 – 1975

Polish mathematician, best known for the Mostowski Collapse Lemma.
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1914

Hanna Neumann

1914 – 1971

Full maiden name: Johanna von Caemmerer.

German-born mathematician active in the field of group theory.

Wife of Bernhard Neumann and mother of Peter M. Neumann.
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Martin Gardner

1914 – 2010

American mathematician and magician best known for the books he wrote (of which there were many) popularizing mathematics and science.

Author of the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American between 1956 and 1981. This position was taken over by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Also contributed a series of "puzzle page" articles for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in the late 1970's to early 1980's.

Also wrote a column called Notes of a Fringe Watcher (originally Notes of a Psi-Watcher) from 1983 to 2002 for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's periodical Skeptical Inquirer.
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1915

Milton Abramowitz

1915 – 1958

American mathematician who made his mark co-editing the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Irene Stegun.
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Robert Henry Sorgenfrey

1915 – 1995

American mathematician who made significant contributions to the field of topology.
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Richard Wesley Hamming

1915 – 1998

American mathematician best known for his work on error-detecting codes.

Thus he started a new field of study within information theory.
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Daniel Martin

1915 – 2007

British mathematician working mainly as a teacher of calculus.
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Ivan Morton Niven

1915 – 1999

Canadian-American mathematician, most noted for solving most of Waring's Problem.

Also notable for Niven Numbers and Niven's Constant.
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Bryant Tuckerman

1915 – 2002

American mathematician who discovered, on March 4th, 1971, the 24th Mersenne prime: $2^{19\ 937} - 1$.
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1916

Paul Richard Halmos

1916 – 2006

Hungarian-born mathematician who made fundamental advances in the areas of probability theory, statistics, operator theory, and functional analysis (in particular, Hilbert spaces).
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Richard Kenneth Guy

b. 1916

English mathematician active in the fields of game theory, number theory and graph theory.
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1917

Graham Higman

1917 – 2008

English mathematician active in the field of group theory.
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Patrick Alfred Pierce Moran

1917 – 1988

Pat Moran was an Australian statistician who established some significant results in probability.

The Moran medal was named in his honour.
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Irving Marmer Copi

1917 – 2002

Irving Marmer Copi (born Copilovich) was an American philosopher and mathematician best known for his university textbooks.
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Elizabeth Scott

1917 – 1988

Elizabeth Leonard ("Betty") Scott was an American mathematician active in the field of group theory, more renowned for her work in astronomy.

Also involved (with Jerzy Neyman) in the science of rainmaking by cloud seeding.
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Sergei Vasilovich Fomin

1917 – 1975

Russian mathematician best known for his contribution towards the book Introductory Real Analysis.
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1918

Geoffrey Thomas Kneebone

1918 – 2003

British mathematician who worked in geometry, set theory and mathematical logic.

Best known for his collaborative writings with John Greenlees Semple.
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Leon Mirsky

1918 – 1983

Russian-born mathematician who worked mainly in the fields of number theory, linear algebra and combinatorics
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1919

Irene Stegun

b. 1919

American mathematician who took over the work of co-editing the Handbook of Mathematical Functions from Milton Abramowitz, who died in 1958 before the work was complete.
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Thomas James Willmore

1919 – 2005

British mathematician best known for his work on differential geometry.
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Richard Friederich Arens

1919 – 2000

German-born American mathematician who worked in the fields of functional analysis and topology.
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Raymond Smullyan

b. 1919

Raymond Merrill Smullyan (known as "Ray") is an American mathematician and logician, noted for the accessibility of his books on logic.

He is also a concert pianist and magician.
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Vladimir Abramovich Rokhlin

1919 – 1984

Name in Russian: Владимир Абрамович Рохлин.

Noted for his work in topology.
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Donald Kalish

1919 – 2000

American logician, also known as an activist against the Vietnam war.
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Ian Naismith Sneddon

1919 – 2000

British applied mathematician who is most noted for his work researching elasticity.
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1920

Isaac Asimov

1920 – 1992

Russian-born professor of biochemistry, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books.

One of the most hugely prolific and influential writers of all time.
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Jerzy Łoś

1920 – 1998

Polish mathematician, best known for his work on ultraproducts, in particular for Łoś's Theorem.
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Kenneth Eugene Iverson

1920 – 2004

Canadian computer scientist best known for his invention of the computer language APL.

Also known for the notation known as Iverson's convention.
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1921 - 1930

1921

Marion Kirkland Fort, Jr.

1921 – 1964

M. K. Fort, Jr., known as Kirk, was an American mathematician specialising in topology.
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Robert C. Prim

b. 1921

Robert Clay Prim is an American mathematician working mainly in the field of computer science.
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Walter Rudin

1921 – 2010

Austrian-born American mathematician best known for the widely-used college textbooks he wrote.
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Pierre Samuel

1921 – 2009

French mathematician working mainly in the fields of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry.

A second-generation member of the Bourbaki group.

Best known (and greatly appreciated) for the books he wrote.

Politically active in the spheres of social justice and environmentalism.
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Gerd Edzard Harry Reuter

1921 – 1992

Harry Reuter was a German-born mathematician who emigrated to Britain who worked mainly in the fields of probability theory and analysis.
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1922

Ben Noble

1922 – 2006

British mathematician best known for his work in numerical analysis.
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Patrick Colonel Suppes

b. 1922

American philosopher who has written on a variety of subjects, including mathematics.
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1923

Steven Alexander Gaal

b. ca. 1923

Hungarian-American mathematician also known as Istvan Sandor Gal (or I.S. Gal).
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Tom Mike Apostol

b. 1923

American mathematician of Greek origin best known for his textbooks and skill as a teacher.
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Maks Aizikovich Akivis

b. 1923

Russian mathematician who worked mainly in the fields of differential geometry and linear algebra.

Student of Israel Gelfand.
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George Spencer-Brown

b. 1923

British mathematician and philosopher best known for his book Laws of Form.

Has made claims to the proofs of some famous hypotheses, but these have not been validated.
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1924

Howard Raiffa

b. 1924

American mathematician who mainly works in game theory and economics.
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Eugene Borisovich Dynkin

b. 1924

Russian mathematician (Евге́ний Бори́сович Ды́нкин), whose work is in probability and algebra.
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David Roxbee Cox

b. 1924

British mathematician working mainly in the field of statistics.
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Benoît B. Mandelbrot

1924 – 2010

French-American mathematician of Polish origin famous for his work on fractals.

The Mandelbrot set is named for him.
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John Warner Backus

1924 – 2007

American computer scientist, significantly involved in the development of several computer languages, including ALGOL and FORTRAN.

The metalanguage Backus-Naur Form (BNF) was named after him (who invented it) and Peter Naur (who refined it).
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1925

Gabriel Andrew Dirac

1925 – 1984

Swiss mathematician who mainly worked in graph theory.

Stepson of Paul Dirac and nephew of Eugene Wigner.
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Robert Duncan Luce

b. 1925

American mathematician known for his work in game theory and economics.
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1926

John C. Shepherdson

b. 1926

Professor emeritus at the University of Bristol, England.

Co-designer (with Howard Sturgis) of the Unlimited Register Machine, a refinement of the Turing machine.
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Gaisi Takeuti

b. 1926

Gaisi Takeuti (竹内 外史, also rendered Takeuchi Gaishi) is a Japanese mathematician specialising in logic and set theory.
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Robert Lawson Vaught

1926 – 2002

American mathematician who mainly worked in mathematical logic, and was one of the founders of model theory.
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Hilary Whitehall Putnam

b. 1926

American mathematician and philosopher, who has written significantly on various subjects, such as the philosophy of logic and language acquisition.
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Richard C. Jeffrey

1926 – 2002

American mathematician who mainly worked in logic and probability theory.
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1927

Richard S. Pierce

1927 – 1992

American mathematician who mainly worked in abstract algebra.
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Masayoshi Nagata

1927 – 2008

Japanese mathematician who worked mainly in the field of commutative algebra.
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John Lewis Selfridge

1927 – 2010

American mathematician who contributed to the fields of analytic number theory, computational number theory and combinatorics.

Proved in 1962 that $78 \ 557$ is a Sierpiński number.

Conjectured (with Wacław Sierpiński) that it is also the smallest. This still has not been proven (see Sierpiński Problem).
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1928

Joseph Kruskal

b. 1928

Joseph Bernard Kruskal, Jr. is an American mathematician working in the fields of statistics, computer science and graph theory, among others.
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Alexander Grothendieck

b. 1928

German-born mathematician of semi-Ukrainian ancestry who is usually credited with creating the modern field of algebraic geometry.

His collaborative seminar-driven approach had the result of making him one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century.
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Wolfgang Haken

b. 1928

German mathematician mainly involved in topology where the bulk of his work has been on 3-dimensional manifolds.

In 1976, along with Kenneth Appel, proved the Four Color Theorem with the help of a computer.
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Jürgen Kurt Moser

1928 – 1999

German mathematician mainly involved in dynamical systems.
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Donald Bruce Gillies

1928 – 1975

Canadian mathematician and computer scientist.

In 1963, discovered the 21st, 22nd and 23rd Mersenne primes with the aid of the ILLIAC II computer. The largest of these ($2^{11 \ 213} - 1$) was reported in the Guinness Book of Records and immortalised on all mail sent from the postroom of the University of Illinois.
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Peter Naur

b. 1928

Danish astronomer, computer scientist and empirical philosopher who was significantly involved in the development of ALGOL.

The metalanguage Backus-Naur Form was named after John Backus (who invented it) and him (who refined it), but would rather it were called Backus Normal Form.
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Donald G. Higman

1928 – 2006

American mathematician noted for his discovery of the Higman-Sims Group, with Charles C. Sims.

His work contributed towards the discovery of several of the sporadic simple groups.
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1929

Hans Ivar Riesel

b. 1929

Swedish mathematician who found the 18th Mersenne prime $2^{3217} - 1$ in 1957.

He held the record for the highest known prime from 1957 to 1961, when Alexander Hurwitz found the next two.
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Anthony James Merrill Spencer

1929 – 2008

Tony Spencer was a mathematician working mainly in the field of material mechanics.
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1930

Edsger W. Dijkstra

1930 – 2002

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a hugely influential Dutch pioneer of computer science.
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Edward John Lemmon

1930 – 1966

Usually known as John Lemmon. Best known as a writer on logic, particularly modal logic.
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Donald J. Newman

1930 – 2007

American mathematician active in the fields of Complex Analysis, Number Theory and Approximation Theory.

Best known for his elementary proof of the Prime Number Theorem.
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James Raymond Munkres

b. 1930

American mathematician and author of Topology, one of the most popular undergraduate topology textbooks.
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Richard Montague

1930 – 1971

Richard Merett Montague was an American mathematician and logician.

Proved that ZFC must contain infintely many axioms.
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John Rolfe Isbell

1930 – 2005

American mathematician best known for his work in topology and category theory.

Also published the pseudonyms John Rainwater, M.G. Stanley and H.C. Enos.
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1931 - 1940

1931

Henri J. Nussbaumer

b. 1931

French mathematician and engineer who has written a few works on the fast fourier transform.
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Herbert Saul Wilf

b. 1931

American mathematician who specializes in combinatorics and graph theory.

He has made available certain of his works for free download.
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John Willard Milnor

b. 1931

American mathematician best known for his work in differential topology.
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Roger Penrose

b. 1931

British physicist and mathematician renowned for his work in cosmology.

The creator of the Penrose tiles.
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1932

Kenneth Appel

b. 1932

Kenneth Ira Appel is an American mathematician who in 1976, along with Wolfgang Haken, proved the Four Color Theorem with the help of a computer.
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Dana Stewart Scott

b. 1932

American computer scientist, logician and philosopher.
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1933

Chen Jingrun

1933 – 1996

Simplified Chinese: 陈景润; traditional Chinese: 陳景潤; pinyin: Chén Jǐngrùn; Wade-Giles: Ch'en Chingjun. Chen is his family name.

Chinese mathematician who made significant inroads into Goldbach's Conjecture by proving what is now referred to as Chen's Theorem.
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Nils John Nilsson

b. 1933

American: one of the founders in the field of artificial intelligence.
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1934

Azriel Levy

b. 1934

Israeli mathematician and logician.

Professor emeritus at the University of Jerusalem.

Worked on several results investigating the Axiom of Choice.
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1935

Hillel Furstenberg

b. 1935

Hillel (Harry) Furstenberg (Hebrew: הלל (הארי) פורסטנברג‎) is an Israeli mathematician famous for his proof, using techniques from topology, on the infinitude of primes.
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Ronald Lewis Graham

b. 1935

American mathematician famous for his work in the field of Ramsey theory.

Notable for introducing Graham's number, the largest number ever yet encountered in mathematics.

Popularized the concept of the Erdős number.

Husband of Fan Chung Graham, friend and colleague of Paul Erdős.
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Nicolas Bourbaki

established 1935

Nicolas Bourbaki is the name given to a group of (mainly) French mathematicians whose aim was to present an account of the entirety of modern mathematics, with an emphasis on rigour and generality.
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1936

Herbert Bruce Enderton

1936 – 2010

American mathematician best known for his textbooks in mathematical logic and set theory.

Also a popular educational contributor to various usenet groups.
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Howard E. Sturgis

1936 – 1990

American mathematician and computer scientist.

Co-designer (with John Shepherdson) of the Unlimited Register Machine, a refinement of the Turing machine.
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1937

Alexander Hurwitz

b. 1937

American mathematician who found the 19th and 20th Mersenne primes $2^{4253} - 1$ and $2^{4423} - 1$ in 1961.
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John Horton Conway

b. 1937

British-born mathematician noted for his work in group theory and recreational mathematics.

Inventor of The Game of Life.
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1938

Robert Berger

b. 1938

American mathematician known for devising the first aperiodic tiling, using a set of $20 \ 426$ distinct tile shapes.
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J. Arthur Seebach

1938 – 1996

J. Arthur Seebach, Jr. was an American mathematician best known for the groundbreaking Counterexamples in Topology which he co-authored with Lynn Arthur Steen, "... a counterexample to the view, widespread at the time, that undergraduates could neither do nor even contribute to research in mathematics.".

An early advocate for introducing computers into the educational curriculum.
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Charles Coffin Sims

b. 1938

American mathematician active in the field of group theory.

With Donald G. Higman, discovered the Higman-Sims Group.

Developed software leading up to the discovery of the Lyons Group (also known as Lyons-Sims Group) and O'Nan Group (also known as O'Nan-Sims Group).
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Donald Ervin Knuth

b. 1938

Pronounced K-Nooth.

Hugely influential American computer scientist famous for his multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming, still famously a work in progress.

The "father of analysis of algorithms".

Pioneered research and design of the representation of mathematics via computer. Author of Computers and Typesetting, another multi-volume work.
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Yiannis Nicholas Moschovakis

b. 1938

In Greek: Γιάννης Μοσχοβάκης.

Greek mathematician known for his work in the fields of set theory, descriptive set theory and recursion theory.
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George Eyre Andrews

b. 1938

American mathematician best known for his work in number theory.

Famous for discovering Ramanujan's Lost Notebook in 1976.
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1939

John Bligh Conway

b. 1939

American mathematician best known for his comprehensive books on functional and complex analysis.
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Brian Hartley

1939 – 1994

British mathematician mainly noted for his work in group theory.

Best remembered by undergraduates for his much-cited textbook Rings, Modules and Linear Algebra (1970) which he cowrote with Trevor Hawkes.

A student of Philip Hall, and a tutor of Ian Stewart.
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Alan Baker

b. 1939

British mathematician whose main area of work has been in finding effective methods for number theory.
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Stephen Arthur Cook

b. 1939

American mathematician and computer scientist who has made considerable progress in the field of complexity theory.
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1940

David Wells

b. 1940

British populist of mathematics best known for his various "curious and interesting" dictionaries.
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Daniel Gray Quillen

1940 – 2011

American mathematician mainly working in the field of algebraic topology.
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George Stephen Boolos

1940 – 1996

American philosopher who also worked in the field of mathematical logic.
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Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp

b. 1940

American mathematician and computer scientist famous for his contributions towards game theory.

Also the innovator of several computer algorithms.
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Peter Michael Neumann

b. 1940

British mathematician working mainly in the field of group theory.

Famous for solving Alhazen's Problem in 1997.

Son of Bernhard Neumann and Hanna Neumann.
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1941 - 1950

1941

Lynn Arthur Steen

b. 1941

American mathematician best known for the groundbreaking Counterexamples in Topology which he co-authored with J. Arthur Seebach, Jr..
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Gyula O. H. Katona

b. 1941

Hungarian mathematician best known for his work in the field of combinatorial set theory.

Proved the Erdős-Ko-Rado Theorem.

Father of Gyula Y. Katona, who works in similar fields.
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David Orme Tall

b. 1941

British mathematician mainly working in the field of educational psychology.

Also known for the books he has co-written with Ian Stewart.
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Alexander Keewatin Dewdney

b. 1941

Canadian mathematician, computer scientist and philosopher.

Between 1984 and 1993, he took over from Douglas Hofstadter the task of writing the Metamagical Themas column in Scientific American, which he renamed to Computer Recreations, then Mathematical Recreations.
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Roland Edwin Larson

b. 1941

Roland Edwin ("Ron") Larson is an American professor of mathematics, best known for the widely-used books (covering all levels from from pre-school to college) written by him, often in collaboration.
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1942

Stephen William Hawking

b. 1942

British mathematician, physicist and cosmologist best known for his works of popular science.
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1943

Edmund Frederick Robertson

b. 1943

Scots mathematician currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

He is one of the owners of the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive along with John J. O'Connor.
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1945

Douglas Richard Hofstadter

b. 1945

American mathematician and philosopher most noted for the books he has written.

In particular, famous for being the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

Between 1981 and 1983, he took over from Martin Gardner the task of writing the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American, which he renamed to Metamagical Themas.
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Robert Charles Vaughan

b. 1945

Bob Vaughan is a British mathematician whose main work is in analytic number theory.
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Timothy Poston

b. 1945

British mathematician and physicist best known for work in catastrophe theory.

Also the scientific and mathematical advisor to Genesis P-Orridge.
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John J. O'Connor

b. 1945

English-born mathematician who has worked in the fields of topology and computational algebra.

He is one of the owners of the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive along with Edmund F. Robertson.
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Ian Stewart

b. 1945

Ian Nicholas Stewart is an English mathematician who has made considerable contributions to the field of catastrophe theory.

He is more famous, however, as a popular writer and publicist of mathematics.

As one of the contributors to the Science of Discworld series, he was created an honorary Wizard of Unseen University.
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1946

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker

b. 1946

Rudy Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher.

Best known (in the field of mathematics) for his work Infinity and the Mind.
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1947

Gregory John Chaitin

b. 1947

Argentinian-American mathematician active mainly in computability theory and metamathematics.
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Keith Devlin

b. 1947

English author and publicist of mathematics.
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1948

Mordechai Ben-Ari

b. 1948

Israeli mathematician best known for his work in mathematical logic and computer science.
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Michael R. Genesereth

b. 1948

American professor of computer science.
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Leonid Anatolievich Levin

b. 1948

Soviet-American computer scientist best known for his exposition of what is now known as the Cook-Levin Theorem.
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1949

Lee Vernon Stiff

b. 1949

American mathematician working mainly in the field of mathematics education research.

Author and co-author of several mathematics textbooks.
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Fan Chung

b. 1949

Fan Rong K Chung Graham (金芳蓉, pinyin: Jīn Fāngróng) is a Taiwanese-American mathematician noted for her work in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs.

Generalized the Erdős-Rényi model.

Wife of Ronald Graham, friend and colleague of Paul Erdős.
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1950

Geoffrey Grimmett

b. 1950

English mathematician best known for his work in probability theory.
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1951 - 1960

1951

Steven George Krantz

b. 1951

American mathematician best known for his writing and teaching.
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1953

Andrew John Wiles

b. 1953

English mathematician famous for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, which he completed in 1994.

"I think I'll stop there."
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1954

Oren Patashnik

b. 1954

American computer scientist best known for co-authoring Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science with Ronald L. Graham and Donald E. Knuth.
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1956

Colin Conrad Adams

b. 1956

American mathematician, humorist and prolific writer active in knot theory and topology.

Active in combating the too-common psychological condition of math anxiety.
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1957

Clifford A. Pickover

b. 1957

American mathematician whose main research area is fractals.

Also a prolific popular writer on several topics.
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1958

Kate Bush

b. 1958

English musician and composer whose contribution to mathematics was to compose a piece called $\pi$ which contains (inaccurately) the first 150 or so digits of its decimal expansion.
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1959

Stephen Wolfram

b. 1959

English mathematician best known for being the name behind Mathematica.

Much of his work has been in the field of cellular automata.
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1960

Landon Curt Noll

b. 1960

American mathematician best noted for finding the two Mersenne primes $M_{21\ 701}$ and $M_{23\ 209}$ while still at high school (the first together with Laura Nickel, now Ariel Glenn).
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Carol Jean Vorderman

b. 1960

British mathematically literate TV presenter best known for having presented Countdown for 26 years.

Has intensive involvement in the British government's initiative to improve the mathematical literacy of school students. Whether you consider this as a point in her favour or against her depends on how cynically you view the government of the United Kingdom. It is worth pointing out that the website presented in her name has had a mixed reception.

A 3rd-class degree from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge is known as a Vorderman in her honour.
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Matt Westwood

b. 1960

British amateur mathematician best known for the discovery of Westwood's Puzzle.

One of the more tedious practitioners of the modern tendency towards Bourbakism.
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1961 and on

Kenneth Keeler

b. 1961

Kenneth "Ken" Keeler is an American mathematician who passes the time between theorems writing episodes of Futurama.

The Futurama episode The Prisoner of Benda features an application of what we on ProofWiki are going to call the Futurama Theorem. Who said permutation theory was boring?
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John Carlos Baez

b. 1961

American mathematician and physicist known for his work in spin foams in loop quantum gravity.

Also known for his writings on octonions and higher-order Clifford algebras.
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Marcus du Sautoy

b. 1965

Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy is a British professor of mathematics best known for his authorship of popular mathematical works.

Also a TV presenter.
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Gyula Y. Katona

b. 1965

Hungarian mathematician working mainly in graph theory.

The son of Gyula O. H. Katona.
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Grigori Perelman

b. 1966

Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman (Russian: Григорий Яковлевич Перельман), is a Russian mathematician famous for solving Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture, and hence completing the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.

Also known as "Grisha".
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