ProofWiki:Mathematicians/Sorted By Nation/Britain
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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England
John of Holywood
c. 1195 – 1256
English mathematician and monk, also (perhaps better) known as Johannes de Sacrobosco (his name translated into Italian), best known for his works concerning astronomy and the calendar.
Proposed an amendment to the Julian calendar (at the time ten days adrift). His suggestions were influential on Christopher Clavius's own work to develop the Gregorian calendar.
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William of Ockham
c. 1288 – 1347 or 1348
English philosopher-monk whose main contribution towards philosophical thought was what is now known as Occam's Razor.
Also wrote down (in words) what are now known as De Morgan's laws.
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Henry Briggs
1561 – 1630
English mathematician most famous for converting natural (Napierian) logarithms into common (Briggsian) logarithms.
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Edward Wright
1561 – 1615
English mathematician noted for his contributions to the science of cartography.
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William Oughtred
1574 – 1660
English mathematician credited with the invention of the slide rule.
Also credited with inventing a circular version although precedence for this was disputed with his student Richard Delamain.
Experimented with notations in his famously compact writings, inventing some new symbology which stuck, notably $\times$, $\sin$ and $\cos$.
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Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679
English thinker better known for being an astute political philosopher than as a mathematician.
Best known in mathematical circles for believing that he had solved the problem of Squaring the Circle.
Generally considered a mathematical ignoramus, his influence was perhaps of greater importance than generally considered, if only because of the stimulating controversy and discussion he raised.
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Richard Delamain
1600 – 1644
English mathematician credited with the invention of a circular slide rule although precedence for this was disputed with his tutor William Oughtred.
At one time was mathematics tutor to Charles I of England.
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John Pell
1611 – 1685
English mathematician and foreign diplomat most famous for what is now known as Pell's Equation.
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John Wallis
1616 – 1703
English mathematician who made considerable contributions towards the invention of the calculus.
Credited with introducing the symbol $\infty$ for infinity.
One of the first English mathematicians to use the techniques of analytic geometry as defined by Descartes.
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William Brouncker
1620 – 1684
William Brouncker, 2nd Viscount Brouncker was an English mathematician best known for Brouncker's Formula, an expansion for pi in the form of a generalized continued fraction.
Popularly believed to have been the first European to provide the solution to what is known as Pell's Equation, but the supposition that its name was a misattibution by Euler is disputed.
Improved on William Neile's computation of the arc length of the semicubical parabola $a y^2 = x^3$.
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Robert Hooke
1635 – 1703
English scientist who worked in many fields and investigated a great deal of stuff.
In the field of applied mathematics he is best known for Hooke's Law.
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William Neile
1637 – 1670
William Neile, sometimes rendered Neil, was an English mathematician whose most important work was on the rectification of the semicubical parabola, which was an important stage in the development of calculus.
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Isaac Newton
1642 – 1727
Hugely influential English all-rounder famous for:
- Inventing calculus, independently of Leibniz.
- Successfully providing a mathematical model for the force of gravity;
- Formulating the Principle of Conservation of Momentum and Principle of Conservation of Angular Momentum;
- Building the first practical optical reflecting telescope;
- Developing a theory of colour based on the splitting of light with a prism;
and much more.
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Brook Taylor
1685 – 1731
English mathematician noted for Taylor's Theorem, but he was not the only one to have been exploring it.
Also made progress in the mathematics of perspective and the foundations of projective geometry.
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Thomas Bayes
1702 – 1761
The Rev. Thomas Bayes was a mathematician and Presbyterian minister.
Most famous for his formulation of what is now known as Bayes' Theorem.
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William Ludlam
c. 1717 – 1788
English mathematician and writer on theology who was a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge.
Credited with first formulating what is now known as Playfair's Axiom.
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Edward Waring
c. 1736 – 1798
English mathematician mainly active in the fields of number theory and analysis.
Most famous for posing what are now called:
- Waring's Problem;
- Waring's Prime Number Conjecture, otherwise known as the Goldbach Conjecture.
"Waring was one of the profoundest mathematicians of the eighteenth century; but the inelegance and obscurity of his writings prevented him from obtaining that reputation to which he was entitled." -- Thomas Thomson.
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John Wilson
1741 – 1793
English mathematician remembered mainly for Wilson's Theorem, which was in fact published by Edward Waring and came originally from Ibn al-Haytham ("Alhazen"). It was in fact proved by Lagrange in 1793.
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John Farey
1766 – 1826
British geologist, known for defining the Farey Sequence.
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Peter Barlow
1776 – 1862
English mathematician and physicist, famous for his New Mathematical Tables, which would be later republished and known as Barlow's Tables and become a standard reference work.
Also (disappointingly) notable for his prediction in 1811 that no prime greater than $2^{31} - 1$ would ever be discovered.
Also noted for his work on magnetism and strength of materials.
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George Green
1793 – 1841
Famously (and mystifyingly) self-taught English mathematical physicist best known for Green's Theorem.
Did pioneering work on electromagnetism.
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James Joseph Sylvester
1814 – 1897
English mathematician who contributed to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory and combinatorics.
Contributed notably to the growth of mathematics in the USA.
Tutor of Florence Nightingale.
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Florence Nightingale
1820 – 1910
One of the most famous people in British history, she reformed the system of care in military field hospitals.
However, she was also a gifted mathematician, and contributed significantly to the field of statistics.
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Isaac Todhunter
1820 – 1884
English mathematician best known nowadays for his books on mathematics and its history.
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Arthur Cayley
1821 – 1895
English mathematician most famous for his work in group theory and graph theory.
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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
1832 – 1898
Better known as Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson was a logician, and also an Anglican priest and author.
He is best known nowadays for his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, not (on the surface) works of mathematics.
His actual mathematical works were idiosyncratic, often focused on making mathematical concepts (in particular, logical syllogisms) accessible to children.
One of the first to treat logical elements with symbols, thus contributing to the birth of symbolic logic.
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John Venn
1834 – 1923
British mathematician active particularly in the fields of statistics and logic.
Best known for his invention of the Venn diagram.
Later in his career he turned his attention to history.
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Edwin Abbott Abbott
1838 – 1926
English mathematician and philosopher whose claim to mathematical immortality lies in his speculative fictional work Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions.
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William Kingdon Clifford
1845 – 1879
English mathematician and philosopher best known for his work on what is now known as Clifford algebra.
Did much of the intellectual groundwork for the General Theory of Relativity.
Died prematurely as a result of tuberculosis probably brought on through overwork.
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Alfred North Whitehead
1861 – 1947
English mathematician who also studied philosophy.
Best known for his co-authorship with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica, published from 1910.
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Thomas Little Heath
1861 – 1940
English Civil servant who is best known for his scholarly translations of the Greek classics of mathematics into English.
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Leonard James Rogers
1862 – 1933
English mathematician famous for the Rogers-Ramanujan Identities and for proving a special case of Hölder's inequality.
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William Henry Young
1863 – 1942
English mathematician, who worked on measure theory, Fourier series, differential calculus amongst other fields.
Made brilliant and long-lasting contributions to the study of functions of several complex variables.
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Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich
1875 – 1929
English all-rounder mathematician who committed suicide from mental illness supposedly brought on by overwork.
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Godfrey Harold Hardy
1877 – 1947
English mathematician noted for his work in number theory and analysis.
Also famous for his discovery and mentorship of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Non-mathematicians remember him mainly for his book A Mathematician's Apology.
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Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain
1879 – 1919
British logician whose work was in the fields of mathematical logic and the foundations of set theory.
He also applied his results in logic to the field of physics.
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John Edensor Littlewood
1885 – 1977
British mathematician best known for his collaborations with G.H. Hardy.
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Sydney Chapman
1888 – 1970
English mathematician whose most noted mathematical accomplishments were in the field of stochastic processes.
Worked out the photochemical mechanisms that give rise to the ozone layer.
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Edward Lindsay Ince
1891 – 1941
English mathematician who worked mainly in the field of differential equations.
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John Charles Burkill
1900 – 1983
Known as both John Burkill and Charles Burkill.
British mathematician whose main work was in analysis.
Also renowned for the quality of his teaching books.
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Edward Thomas Copson
1901 – 1980
British mathematician best known for his textbooks in various fields.
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Frank Plumpton Ramsey
1903 – 1930
British mathematican most famous for founding the field of what is now called Ramsey Theory.
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Philip Hall
1904 – 1982
English mathematician active in the field of group theory.
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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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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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Harold Davenport
1907 – 1969
English mathematician who worked mainly in number theory.
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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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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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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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Richard Kenneth Guy
b. 1916
English mathematician active in the fields of game theory, number theory and graph theory.
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Graham Higman
1917 – 2008
English mathematician active in the field of group theory.
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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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Thomas James Willmore
1919 – 2005
British mathematician best known for his work on differential geometry.
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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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Ben Noble
1922 – 2006
British mathematician best known for his work in numerical analysis.
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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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David Roxbee Cox
b. 1924
British mathematician working mainly in the field of statistics.
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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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Anthony James Merrill Spencer
1929 – 2008
Tony Spencer was a mathematician working mainly in the field of material mechanics.
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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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Roger Penrose
b. 1931
British physicist and mathematician renowned for his work in cosmology.
The creator of the Penrose tiles.
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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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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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David Wells
b. 1940
British populist of mathematics best known for his various "curious and interesting" dictionaries.
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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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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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Stephen William Hawking
b. 1942
British mathematician, physicist and cosmologist best known for his works of popular science.
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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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Keith Devlin
b. 1947
English author and publicist of mathematics.
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Geoffrey Grimmett
b. 1950
English mathematician best known for his work in probability theory.
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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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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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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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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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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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Wales
Robert Recorde
1510 – 1558
Welsh physician and mathematician.
Best known for inventing the equals sign. This was just part of his contribution towards the development and systematization of mathematical notation.
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Bertrand Russell
1872 – 1970
Full name: Bertrand Arthur William Russell, the 3rd Earl Russell.
British philosopher, mathematician and logician.
Best known for his co-authorship with Alfred North Whitehead of Principia Mathematica, published from 1910.
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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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Scotland
John Napier
1550 – 1617
Scots mathematician famous for his development of natural logarithms.
His name is spelt variously as Jhone, and Napeir, Nepair, Nepeir, Neper, Napare, Naper, Naipper.
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James Stirling
1692 – 1770
Scottish mathematician best known for Stirling's Formula.
One of the first to study what is now known as the Gamma function.
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Colin Maclaurin
1698 – 1746
Alternatively rendered M'Laurine.
Held the record for almost 300 years as the youngest professor in history.
Worked extensively on elliptic functions.
Best known nowadays for Maclaurin Series.
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Matthew Stewart
1717 – 1785
Scottish mathematician who made significant contributions to the fields of geometry and astronomy.
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John Playfair
1748 – 1819
Scots mathematician and scientific philosopher who was an early proponent of the philosophical position that physical laws are the same throughout the universe and do not change with time.
Also credited with Playfair's axiom, an alternative (and easier to digest) form of Euclid's Fifth Postulate, although he himself did not originate it.
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Andrew Gray
1847 – 1925
British mathematician and physicist who worked on electromagnetism, dynamics and Bessel functions.
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Robert John Tainsh Bell
1876 – 1963
Scottish mathematician noted for his work in solid geometry.
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Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville
1879 – 1934
Scots mathematician (sometimes rendered Duncan M'Laren Young Sommerville) best known for his work in geometry, including non-Euclidean.
A founder, and first secretary, of the New Zealand Astronomical Society.
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Joseph Wedderburn
1882 – 1948
Scottish mathematician most famous for his work in abstract algebra.
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Eric Temple Bell
1883 – 1960
Scottish mathematician now more famous for his popular work on the history of mathematics Men of Mathematics.
Did research in number theory and analysis, and (less than successfully) worked on putting umbral calculus on a sound logical footing.
Also noted (in certain circles) for writing science fiction (under the pseudonym John Taine) and poetry.
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Daniel Martin
1915 – 2007
British mathematician working mainly as a teacher of calculus.
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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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Northern Ireland
John Greenlees Semple
1904 – 1985
British mathematician whose most important work was in algebraic geometry.
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Other
Augustus De Morgan
1806 – 1871
British mathematician and logician best known for De Morgan's laws.
Also introduced and made rigorous the Principle of Mathematical Induction.
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References
- ↑ Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics, 1937, Victor Gollancz, London.
