ProofWiki:Mathematicians/Sorted By Nation/United States
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."
[ 1]
USA
Benjamin Peirce
1809 – 1880
American mathematician and logician who has been called "The founding father of modern abstract algebra".
Like Boole, attempted to put logic on a sound mathematical footing.
He also contributed to many other areas of mathematics.
Proved that there is no odd perfect number with fewer than four prime factors.
Introduced the terms idempotent and nilpotent in 1870, in his work Linear Associative Algebra.
Father of Charles Sanders Peirce.
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Elias Loomis
1811 – 1889
American mathematician and physicist best known for his textbooks.
Also known for his thorough investigation into the geomagnetic storm of 1859.
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Charles Sanders Peirce
1839 – 1914
American chemist who contributed to the fields of logic and mathematical philosophy, in particular the theory of the use of signs.
Laid some of the groundwork for the mathematical discipline of category theory.
Perceived in 1886 that the functions of logic can be carried out by electronic circuitry.
Son of Benjamin Peirce.
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Florian Cajori
1859 – 1930
Swiss-born American mathematician who specialized in (and in fact pioneered) the field of mathematics history.
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David Eugene Smith
1860 – 1944
American mathematician and educator best known for his translations of classics.
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Frank Nelson Cole
1861 – 1926
American mathematician famous for finding the factors of the Mersenne number $M_{67}$. (It had already been demonstrated by Édouard Lucas in 1876 that it is not prime, but till this time the factors had not been found.) Cole's demonstration of this in 1903 took the form of a now famous lecture in which he performed the necessary arithmetic on a blackboard, delivering the only totally wordless lecture in recorded history.
The American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize was named in his honor.
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Derrick Norman Lehmer
1867 – 1938
Derrick Norman Lehmer was an American mathematician active mainly in the field of number theory.
The father of Derrick Henry ("Dick") Lehmer.
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Maxime Bôcher
1867 – 1918
American mathematician who worked on on differential equations, series, and algebra.
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Leonard Eugene Dickson
1874 – 1954
One of the first American mathematicians to work in abstract algebra.
Also remembered for his history of number theory.
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Edward Vermilye Huntington
1874 – 1952
American mathematician who worked on the foundations of mathematics.
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R.E. Powers
Chronology approximate
American mathematician who discovered the 10th and 11th Mersenne primes $2^{89} - 1$ (in 1911) and $2^{107} - 1$ (in 1914.)
In 1916, he determined that $2^{241} - 1$ is composite.
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Robert Daniel Carmichael
1879 – 1967
American mathematician who contributed mainly to the fields of differential equations and number theory.
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Henry Maurice Sheffer
1882 – 1964
American logician famous for proving in 1913 that Boolean algebra can be defined by using just the logical NAND operator. (This had previously been noted by Peirce in 1880 but not published till 1933.)
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James Henry Weaver
1883 – 1942
American mathematician who co-authored books with Robert Daniel Carmichael.
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George David Birkhoff
1884 – 1944
American mathematician best known for what is now known as the Ergodic Theorem.
The father of Garrett Birkhoff.
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James Waddell Alexander II
1888 – 1971
American mathematician who did pioneering work in topology and knot theory.
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Norbert Wiener
1894 – 1964
American mathematician who worked mainly in computer science, stochastic processes and cybernetics.
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Raymond Wilder
1896 – 1982
Raymond L. Wilder was a mathematician best known for his writing on the subject of the philosophy of mathematics.
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Lincoln La Paz
1897 – 1985
American mathematician and pioneer in the field of meteorics.
During World War II, served as research mathematician at the New Mexico Proving Grounds.
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David Vernon Widder
1898 – 1990
American mathematician mainly working in analyis.
He was highly regarded for his teaching abilities.
The author of the textbook Advanced Calculus.
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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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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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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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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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Carl Benjamin Boyer
1906 – 1976
American historian of mathematics and science.
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Hassler Whitney
1907 – 1989
American mathematician who worked mainly in topology.
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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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Stephen Cole Kleene
1909 – 1994
One of the great pioneers in the field of recursion 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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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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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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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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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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Bryant Tuckerman
1915 – 2002
American mathematician who discovered, on March 4th, 1971, the 24th Mersenne prime: $2^{19\ 937} - 1$.
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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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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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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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Donald Kalish
1919 – 2000
American logician, also known as an activist against the Vietnam war.
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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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Patrick Colonel Suppes
b. 1922
American philosopher who has written on a variety of subjects, including mathematics.
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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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Howard Raiffa
b. 1924
American mathematician who mainly works in game theory and economics.
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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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Robert Duncan Luce
b. 1925
American mathematician known for his work in game theory and economics.
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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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Richard S. Pierce
1927 – 1992
American mathematician who mainly worked in abstract 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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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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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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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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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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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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Nils John Nilsson
b. 1933
American: one of the founders in the field of artificial intelligence.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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John Bligh Conway
b. 1939
American mathematician best known for his comprehensive books on functional and complex analysis.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Michael R. Genesereth
b. 1948
American professor of computer science.
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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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Steven George Krantz
b. 1951
American mathematician best known for his writing and teaching.
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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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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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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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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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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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References
- ↑ Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics, 1937, Victor Gollancz, London.
- ↑ In Memorium: J. Arthur Seebach, Jr.: Lynn Arthur Steen.
- ↑ It is impossible accurately to assess the impact of TeX on the ability to communicate mathematics via computer. This website would not have been possible without it.
