Mathematician:Mathematicians/Sorted By Birth/1801 - 1850 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.
- -- Eric Temple Bell: Men of Mathematics, 1937, Victor Gollancz, London
$\text {1801}$ – $\text {1810}$
1801
April
Henry Perigal $($$\text {1801}$ – $\text {1898}$$)$
British stockbroker and amateur mathematician, best known for his dissection proofs, and his dissection-based proof of Pythagoras's Theorem.
Also known for his unorthodox belief that the moon does not rotate.
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July
Julius Plücker $($$\text {1801}$ – $\text {1868}$$)$
German mathematician and physicist who fundamental contributions to the field of analytical geometry.
Pioneer in the investigations of cathode rays that led eventually to the discovery of the electron.
Vastly extended the study of Lamé curves.
Published the first complete classification of plane cubic curves.
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George Biddell Airy $($$\text {1801}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
English mathematician and astronomer
Work on planetary orbits.
Measured the mean density of the Earth.
Devised a method of solution of two-dimensional problems in solid mechanics.
Established Greenwich as the location of the prime meridian.
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September
Mikhail Vasilyevich Ostrogradsky $($$\text {1801}$ – $\text {1862}$$)$
Russian mathematician, mechanician and physicist of Ukrainian origin.
Worked mainly in the mathematical fields of calculus of variations, integration of algebraic functions, number theory, algebra, geometry, probability theory and in the fields of applied mathematics, mathematical physics and classical mechanics.
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October
Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau $($$\text {1801}$ – $\text {1883}$$)$
Belgian physicist and mathematician.
One of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image.
Invented the first device to show a moving image by means of a series of stills, thereby inventing the concept of cinema.
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1802
August
Niels Henrik Abel $($$\text {1802}$ – $\text {1829}$$)$
Norwegian mathematician who died tragically young.
Made significant contributions towards algebra, analysis and group theory.
Best known for proving the impossibility of solving the general quintic in radicals (Abel-Ruffini Theorem).
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December
János Bolyai $($$\text {1802}$ – $\text {1860}$$)$
Hungarian mathematician who was one of the founders of non-Euclidean geometry.
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1803
September
Jacques Charles François Sturm $($$\text {1803}$ – $\text {1855}$$)$
Swiss-born Franco-German mathematical physicist whose work was mainly in the fields of applied mathematics and physics.
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November
Giusto Bellavitis $($$\text {1803}$ – $\text {1880}$$)$
Italian mathematician, senator, and municipal councillor.
Invented of the method of equipollences, which was a precursor to the field of vector analysis.
Published on a wide range of subjects.
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1804
October
Wilhelm Eduard Weber $($$\text {1804}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
German physicist who invented the first electromagnetic telegraph with Carl Friedrich Gauss.
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Pierre François Verhulst $($$\text {1804}$ – $\text {1849}$$)$
Belgian mathematician and a doctor in number theory, best known for the logistic growth model.
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December
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi $($$\text {1804}$ – $\text {1851}$$)$
Prolific Prussian mathematician, now most famous for his work with the elliptic functions.
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Viktor Yakovlevich Bunyakovsky $($$\text {1804}$ – $\text {1889}$$)$
Ukrainian mathematician best known for his contribution to the Cauchy-Bunyakovsky-Schwarz Inequality.
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1805
February
Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet $($$\text {1805}$ – $\text {1859}$$)$
German mathematician who worked mainly in the field of analysis.
Credited with the first formal definition of a function.
Demonstrated that Fermat's Last Theorem holds for $n = 5$.
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August
William Rowan Hamilton $($$\text {1805}$ – $\text {1865}$$)$
Irish mathematician and physicist famous (among other things) for:
- Creating the field of Hamiltonian mechanics
- The discovery of quaternions
- Development of aspects of graph theory.
1806
March
Thomas Penyngton Kirkman $($$\text {1806}$ – $\text {1895}$$)$
British mathematician and ordained minister of the Church of England, renowned for obtaining an existence theorem for Steiner triple systems that founded the field of combinatorial design theory.
Thus he pre-empted Jakob Steiner in this by over $6$ years.
The Kirkman's Schoolgirl Problem is named after him.
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June
Augustus De Morgan $($$\text {1806}$ – $\text {1871}$$)$
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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December
John Thomas Graves $($$\text {1806}$ – $\text {1870}$$)$
Irish jurist and mathematician who both inspired William Rowan Hamilton to discover the quaternions, and discovered the octonions, which he called the octaves.
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Christian Ramus $($$\text {1806}$ – $\text {1856}$$)$
Danish mathematician best known for Ramus's Identity.
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1807
June
Moritz Abraham Stern $($$\text {1807}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$
German mathematician known for formulating Stern's diatomic series.
Also known for the Stern-Brocot Tree which he wrote about in $1858$ and which Louis Achille Brocot independently discovered in $1861$.
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1808
May
John Scott Russell $($$\text {1808}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
Scottish civil engineer, naval architect and shipbuilder who built SS Great Eastern in collaboration with Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Made the discovery of the wave of translation that gave birth to the modern study of solitons.
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Carl Anton Bretschneider $($$\text {1808}$ – $\text {1878}$$)$
German mathematician who worked in geometry, number theory, and history of geometry.
He also worked on logarithmic integrals and mathematical tables.
Probably the first mathematicians to use the symbol $\gamma$ for the Euler-Mascheroni constant, which he published in a paper of $1837$.
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July
Johann Benedict Listing $($$\text {1808}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
German mathematician and physicist who coined the term topology in a letter of $1836$.
In $1858$ he invented the Möbius strip at about the same time that August Ferdinand Möbius did.
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November
Friedrich Julius Richelot $($$\text {1808}$ – $\text {1875}$$)$
German mathematician best known for his construction of the regular $257$-gon.
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Barnaba Tortolini $($$\text {1808}$ – $\text {1874}$$)$
Italian priest and mathematician who founded the first Italian scientific journal with an international presence.
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1809
March
Joseph Liouville $($$\text {1809}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
Active in the fields of number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry, topology, mathematical physics and astronomy.
Proved the existence of transcendental numbers.
Contributed the Sturm-Liouville theory to the field of mathematical physics, in collaboration with Charles Sturm.
Pioneered the study of fractional calculus.
There are several theorems named after him, all in different areas of mathematics and physics.
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April
Benjamin Peirce $($$\text {1809}$ – $\text {1880}$$)$
American mathematician and logician who has been called "The founding father of modern abstract algebra".
Like George 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 idempotence and nilpotence in $1870$, in his work Linear Associative Algebra.
Father of Charles Sanders Peirce.
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Hermann Günter Grassmann $($$\text {1809}$ – $\text {1877}$$)$
Prussian mathematician who pioneered the field of linear algebra and vector analysis.
His work was way ahead of its time, and did not receive the recognition it deserved until much later.
During his life he gained more recognition for his study of languages, including Gothic and Sanskrit, than as a mathematician.
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1810
January
Ernst Eduard Kummer $($$\text {1810}$ – $\text {1893}$$)$
German mathematician mostly active in the field of applied mathematics.
Also worked in abstract algebra and field theory.
Proved that Fermat's Last Theorem holds for all exponents $p$ such that $p$ is a regular prime.
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$\text {1811}$ – $\text {1820}$
1811
April
Ludwig Otto Hesse $($$\text {1811}$ – $\text {1874}$$)$
German mathematician who worked mainly on algebraic invariants and geometry.
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August
Elias Loomis $($$\text {1811}$ – $\text {1889}$$)$
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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Auguste Bravais $($$\text {1811}$ – $\text {1863}$$)$
French physicist known for his work in crystallography, the conception of Bravais lattices, and the formulation of Bravais Law.
Also studied magnetism, the northern lights, meteorology, geobotany, phyllotaxis, astronomy, statistics and hydrography.
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October
Évariste Galois $($$\text {1811}$ – $\text {1832}$$)$
French mathematician famous for dying at the age of 20 as the result of a duel.
Despite his total collected works amounting to a mere 60 pages or so, he had a significant influence in the development of the field of group theory. He was in fact the first person to use the word group in a technical sense.
His innovative approach to the problem of the insolubility of the quintic led to the field known now as Galois theory.
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1812
January
William Shanks $($$\text {1812}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
English amateur mathematician famous for using Machin's Formula for Pi to calculate $\pi$ (pi) to $707$ places in $1873$, a result which was correct only up to the $527$th place.
The error was highlighted in $1945$ (or $1946$) by D.F. Ferguson, using a mechanical calculator.
Shanks' approximation was the longest expansion of $\pi$ until the advent of the electronic digital computer about one century later.
Shanks also calculated Euler's number $e$ and the Euler-Mascheroni constant $\gamma$ to many decimal places.
Also published a table of primes up to $60 \, 000$ and found the natural logarithms of $2$, $3$, $5$ and $10$ to $137$ places.
Also calculated the exact powers of $2$ up to $2^{721}$.
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April
Theodor Schönemann $($$\text {1812}$ – $\text {1868}$$)$
German mathematician who obtained some important results in number theory.
Obtained Hensel's Lemma before Hensel, and formulated Eisenstein's Criterion (also known as the Schönemann-Eisenstein Theorem) before Eisenstein.
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1813
July
Pierre Alphonse Laurent $($$\text {1813}$ – $\text {1854}$$)$
French mathematician and first-rate military and civil engineer best known for his discovery of what is now known as a Laurent series.
Also published works on the theory of light polarization.
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1814
January
Ludwig Schläfli $($$\text {1814}$ – $\text {1895}$$)$
Swiss mathematician, specialising in geometry and complex analysis.
One of the key figures in developing the notion of higher-dimensional spaces.
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May
Daniel da Silva $($$\text {1814}$ – $\text {1878}$$)$
Portuguese mathematician who was also a marine officer.
Credited with the Inclusion-Exclusion Principle, which he published in 1854.
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Eugène Charles Catalan $($$\text {1814}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$
French and Belgian mathematician who is most famous for his work in combinatorics and number theory.
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August
Anders Jonas Ångström $($$\text {1814}$ – $\text {1874}$$)$
Swedish physicist who was one of the founders of the science of spectroscopy.
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September
James Joseph Sylvester $($$\text {1814}$ – $\text {1897}$$)$
English mathematician who contributed to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory and combinatorics.
First coined the word matrix.
Contributed notably to the growth of mathematics in the USA.
Tutor of Florence Nightingale.
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1815
October
Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass $($$\text {1815}$ – $\text {1897}$$)$
German mathematician whose main work concerned the rigorous foundations of calculus.
Known as "the father of modern analysis".
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November
George Boole $($$\text {1815}$ – $\text {1864}$$)$
Irish mathematician famous for his work in the mathematization of logic, and the invention of what is now called Boolean algebra.
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December
Augusta Ada Lovelace $($$\text {1815}$ – $\text {1852}$$)$
English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.
Creator of the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine.
Hence she is often regarded as the first computer programmer.
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1816
1817
March
Angelo Genocchi $($$\text {1817}$ – $\text {1889}$$)$
Italian mathematician who specialized in number theory.
Worked with Giuseppe Peano.
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July
Louis Achille Brocot $($$\text {1817}$ – $\text {1878}$$)$
French clockmaker and amateur mathematician who discovered the Stern-Brocot tree in $1861$ independently of Moritz Abraham Stern.
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Charles Auguste Briot $($$\text {1817}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
French mathematician who worked on elliptic functions.
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1818
January
Alfred Wrigley $($$\text {1818}$ – $\text {1898}$$)$
British professor and teacher who published a book of exercises in mathematics which became known as Wrigley's Examples.
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March
Ferdinand Joachimsthal $($$\text {1818}$ – $\text {1861}$$)$
German mathematician who made substantial contributions to the theory of surfaces, and applied the theory of determinants to geometry.
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December
James Prescott Joule $($$\text {1818}$ – $\text {1889}$$)$
English physicist, mathematician and brewer who studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work.
This led to the law of conservation of energy, which in turn led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics.
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1819
April
Andrew Hollingworth Frost $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1907}$$)$
English amateur mathematician, also a missionary and Anglican priest, best known for his discovery of an order $7$ perfect magic cube, accomplished in $1866$.
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August
George Gabriel Stokes $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1903}$$)$
Mathematician and physicist who made important contributions to fluid dynamics, optics and mathematical physics.
Known for the Navier-Stokes equations and Stokes' theorem.
He was not the pioneer of the latter; it was named after him for his habit of setting its proof as an examination question.
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September
Jean-Claude Bouquet $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1885}$$)$
French mathematician who worked on differential geometry and on series expansions of functions and elliptic functions.
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Jean Bernard Léon Foucault $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1868}$$)$
French physicist best known for his demonstration of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of Earth's rotation.
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George Salmon $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1904}$$)$
Irish mathematician and Anglican theologian who worked in algebraic geometry.
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Claude Séraphin Moret-Blanc $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1886}$$)$
French mathematician who discovered some results in number theory.
Mainly known for the result Sequence of Dudeney Numbers.
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December
Pierre Ossian Bonnet $($$\text {1819}$ – $\text {1892}$$)$
French mathematician who made some important contributions to the differential geometry of surfaces.
Mainly known for the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem.
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1820
May
Florence Nightingale $($$\text {1820}$ – $\text {1910}$$)$
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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July
William John Macquorn Rankine $($$\text {1820}$ – $\text {1872}$$)$
Scottish mechanical engineer who also contributed to civil engineering, physics and mathematics.
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November
Gustav Conrad Bauer $($$\text {1820}$ – $\text {1906}$$)$
German mathematician whose mathematical research dealt with algebra, geometric problems, spherical harmonics, the gamma function, and generalized continued fractions.
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Isaac Todhunter $($$\text {1820}$ – $\text {1884}$$)$
English mathematician best known nowadays for his books on mathematics and its history.
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$\text {1821}$ – $\text {1830}$
1821
March
Heinrich Eduard Heine $($$\text {1821}$ – $\text {1881}$$)$
German mathematician who worked mainly in analysis.
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May
Baldassarre Boncompagni-Ludovisi $($$\text {1821}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$
Italian historian of mathematics best known for his $1857$ republication of Leonardo Fibonacci's Liber Abaci, on whom he wrote extensively.
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Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev $($$\text {1821}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$
Russian mathematician whose work was mainly in the fields of probability, statistics and number theory.
He is best known for proving Bertrand's Postulate in $1850$. It has since been known as the Bertrand-Chebyshev Theorem.
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August
Arthur Cayley $($$\text {1821}$ – $\text {1895}$$)$
English mathematician most famous for his work in group theory and graph theory.
The first to study groups as an abstract concept in their own right.
Also one of the pioneers of matrix algebra, and hence sometimes cited as one of the "fathers" of matrix theory.
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Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz $($$\text {1821}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$
German physicist and medical doctor known (among many other things) for his theories on the conservation of energy, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics.
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October
Philipp Ludwig von Seidel $($$\text {1821}$ – $\text {1896}$$)$
German mathematician who discovered the concept of uniform convergence.
Contributed to the field of optics.
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1822
Léon-François-Antoine Aurifeuille
French mathematician after whom Aurifeuillian factorizations are named.
Also wrote a number of books.
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February
Francis Galton $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1911}$$)$
English statistician, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, and psychometrician.
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March
Jules Antoine Lissajous $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1880}$$)$
French physicist, after whom Lissajous figures are named.
Inventor of the Lissajous apparatus.
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Joseph Louis François Bertrand $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1900}$$)$
French mathematician working in the fields of number theory, differential geometry, probability theory, economics and thermodynamics.
He conjectured Bertrand's Postulate, in 1845, that there is at least one prime between $n$ and $2n - 2$ for every $n > 3$. This was proved in 1850 by Chebyshev, and hence it is also known as the Bertrand-Chebyshev Theorem.
Also wrote plenty on the history of mathematics.
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December
Charles Hermite $($$\text {1822}$ – $\text {1901}$$)$
French mathematician who did research mainly in the fields of number theory and analysis.
The first to prove that e is transcendental.
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1823
April
Ferdinand Gotthold Max Eisenstein $($$\text {1823}$ – $\text {1852}$$)$
German mathematician best known for his work in number theory.
Student of Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Died tragically young of tuberculosis.
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December
Leopold Kronecker $($$\text {1823}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
German mathematician most notable for his view that all of mathematics ought to be based on integers.
Also a proponent of the mathematical philosophy of finitism, a forerunner of intuitionism and constructivism.
His influence on the mathematical establishment was considerable.
His views put him in direct opposition most notably to Georg Cantor, who was exploring the mathematics of the transfinite.
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1824
March
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff $($$\text {1824}$ – $\text {1887}$$)$
Prussian physicist who contributed significantly to the fundamental understanding of electric circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects.
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June
Johann Martin Zacharias Dase $($$\text {1824}$ – $\text {1861}$$)$
German mental calculator famous for calculating $\pi$ to $200$ places in $1844$.
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William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin $($$\text {1824}$ – $\text {1907}$$)$
British mathematical physicist and engineer who did important work in:
- the mathematical analysis of electricity
- formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics
- unification of the discipline of modern physics
Received a knighthood from Queen Victoria for his work on the development of the transatlantic electric telegraph project.
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1825
Edward J. Goodwin $($$\text {1825}$ – $\text {1902}$$)$
Indiana physician and amateur mathematician who believed he had squared the circle, trisected the angle and doubled the cube.
He proposed a bill to allow for the charging of royalties for the use of the value of $\pi$ (pi) that he had calculated.
It was rejected before the second reading through the efforts of Clarence Abiathar Waldo.
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John Williams Nystrom $($$\text {1825}$ – $\text {1885}$$)$
Swedish, later American, civil engineer, inventor, and author.
Best known for inventing a calculating machine and a system of hexadecimal notation.
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March
Francesco Faà di Bruno $($$\text {1825}$ – $\text {1888}$$)$
Italian mathematician and priest, most famous (in mathematics) for Faà di Bruno's Formula on derivatives of composite functions.
Also notable for his beatification on 25th September 1988 by Pope John Paul II.
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July
Henry Wilbraham $($$\text {1825}$ – $\text {1883}$$)$
English mathematician best known for discovering and explaining the Gibbs phenomenon nearly fifty years before Josiah Willard Gibbs did.
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August Beer $($$\text {1825}$ – $\text {1863}$$)$
German physicist and mathematician.
Contributed towards the Beer-Lambert-Bouguer Law.
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1826
January
Giuseppe Battaglini $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$
Italian mathematician best known for being the founder of Giornale di Matematiche, later known as Giornale di Matematiche di Battaglini.
Also did considerable work in the field of non-Euclidean geometry.
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February
Hans Peter Jørgen Julius Thomsen $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1909}$$)$
Danish chemist best known in mathematics for the Thomsen graph.
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March
Alphonse Armand Charles Georges Marie de Polignac $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1862}$$)$
French mathematician best known for De Polignac's Formula and Polignac's Conjecture.
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May
Jean François Théophile Pépin $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1904}$$)$
French mathematician who centred on number theory.
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June
Morgan William Crofton $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1915}$$)$
Irish mathematician who contributed to the field of geometric probability theory.
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July
Daniel Friedrich Ernst Meissel $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1895}$$)$
German astronomer who contributed to various aspects of number theory.
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September
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1866}$$)$
German mathematician most famous for the Riemann Hypothesis, which is (at time of writing, early $21$st century) one of the most highly sought-after results in mathematics.
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November
Henry John Stephen Smith $($$\text {1826}$ – $\text {1883}$$)$
Irish mathematician remembered for his work in elementary divisors, quadratic forms, and the Smith-Minkowski-Siegel Mass Formula in number theory.
Devised the Smith Normal Form of a matrix.
Also worked on elliptic functions.
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1827
Gustavus Frankenstein $($$\text {1827}$ – $\text {1893}$$)$
German-American clock maker, artist, mathematician and writer.
Best known now for being the first to discover a perfect magic cube of order 8.
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January
Ivan Mikheevich Pervushin $($$\text {1827}$ – $\text {1900}$$)$
Russian priest, who worked in number theory in his spare time.
Most famous for demonstrating the primality of the Mersenne number $M_{61}$, which then became known as Pervushin's number.
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October
Ernst von Haselberg $($$\text {1827}$ – $\text {1905}$$)$
German architect and construction official whose mathematical achievement of note was the construction of the magic hexagon.
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1828
1829
Paul Peter Heinrich Seelhoff $($$\text {1829}$ – $\text {1896}$$)$
German mathematician who discovered the Mersenne prime $M61$ in $1886$, independently of Ivan Mikheevich Pervushin.
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August
Norman Macleod Ferrers $($$\text {1829}$ – $\text {1903}$$)$
English mathematician and university administrator, best known nowadays for Ferrers diagrams.
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Moritz Benedikt Cantor $($$\text {1829}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$
German historian of mathematics.
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September
Joseph Wolstenholme $($$\text {1829}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
English mathematician and educator, best known for Wolstenholme's Theorem.
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November
Elwin Bruno Christoffel $($$\text {1829}$ – $\text {1900}$$)$
German mathematician and physicist.
Introduced fundamental concepts of differential geometry, opening the way for the development of tensor calculus.
This later provided the mathematical basis for general relativity.
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1830
December
Antonio Luigi Gaudenzio Giuseppe Cremona $($$\text {1830}$ – $\text {1903}$$)$
Italian mathematician who studied geometry.
Reformed advanced mathematical teaching in Italy.
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$\text {1831}$ – $\text {1840}$
1831
January
Francis Guthrie $($$\text {1831}$ – $\text {1899}$$)$
English-born, later South African, mathematician and botanist, who is best known in the field of mathematics for posing the Four Color Theorem in $1852$.
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April
Peter Guthrie Tait $($$\text {1831}$ – $\text {1901}$$)$
Scottish mathematical physicist and early pioneer in thermodynamics.
Best known for the mathematical physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which he co-wrote with Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin.
Also known for his early investigations into knot theory.
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June
James Clerk Maxwell $($$\text {1831}$ – $\text {1879}$$)$
Scottish scientist in the field of mathematical physics.
Most noted for his theory of electromagnetic radiation.
Maxwell's Equations for electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics" after the first one realised by Isaac Newton.
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October
Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind $($$\text {1831}$ – $\text {1916}$$)$
German mathematician who worked in the fields of abstract algebra, and algebraic number theory.
Most noted for his work on the foundations of the real numbers.
Used the thinking behind the resolution of Galileo's Paradox to underpin the definition of an infinite set.
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December
Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond $($$\text {1831}$ – $\text {1889}$$)$
German mathematician who worked on the mechanical equilibrium of fluids, the theory of functions and in mathematical physics.
Also worked on Sturm–Liouville theory, integral equations, variational calculus, and Fourier series.
In $1873$, constructed a continuous function whose Fourier series is not convergent.
His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost everywhere.
Also established that a trigonometric series that converges to a continuous function at every point is the Fourier series of this function.
Discovered a proof method that later became known as the Cantor's diagonal argument.
His name is also associated with the Fundamental Lemma of Calculus of Variations, of which he proved a refined version based on that of Lagrange.
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1832
January
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson $($$\text {1832}$ – $\text {1898}$$)$
English mathematician and logician, Anglican priest and author of children's books.
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 tended to be 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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May
Carl Gottfried Neumann $($$\text {1832}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$
German mathematician who dealt almost exclusively with problems arising from physics.
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Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz $($$\text {1832}$ – $\text {1903}$$)$
German mathematician who worked in many areas, including analysis, number theory and differential geometry.
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August
Eugène Rouché $($$\text {1832}$ – $\text {1910}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in complex analysis and calculus.
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December
Peter Ludwig Mejdell Sylow $($$\text {1832}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$
Ludwig Sylow was a Norwegian mathematician who established some important facts on the topic of subgroups of prime order.
After retiring from a career of schoolteaching he was appointed to a position as a University professor at the age of $65$.
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1833
May
Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs $($$\text {1833}$ – $\text {1902}$$)$
Prussian mathematician who contributed important research in the field of linear differential equations
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1834
April
Edmond Nicolas Laguerre $($$\text {1834}$ – $\text {1886}$$)$
French mathematician whose main works were in the areas of geometry and complex analysis.
Investigated orthogonal polynomials, including the Laguerre polynomials.
Laguerre's method is a root-finding algorithm tailored to polynomials.
Laid the foundations of a geometry of oriented spheres.
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May
William Jack $($$\text {1834}$ – $\text {1924}$$)$
Scottish mathematician and journalist.
Editor of the Glasgow Herald from $1870$ to $1876$.
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August
John Venn $($$\text {1834}$ – $\text {1923}$$)$
British mathematician, also an ordained priest, who was active particularly in the fields of probability, statistics, set theory 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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November
Ernst Louis Étienne Laspeyres $($$\text {1834}$ – $\text {1913}$$)$
German economist best known today for his development of the index number formula method for determining price increases, used for calculating the rate of inflation.
A type of this calculation is known today as the Laspeyres Index.
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1835
March
Josef Stefan $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1893}$$)$
Austrian Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician, and poet of the Austrian Empire.
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May
Émile Léonard Mathieu $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1890}$$)$
French mathematician known for his work in group theory and mathematical physics.
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August
Artemas Martin $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$
Self-educated American mathematician best known as a contributor to puzzle columns in popular magazines.
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September
William Stanley Jevons $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1882}$$)$
English economist and logician.
Pioneered the mathematical approach to the study of economics.
Refined and developed George Boole's algebra of classes.
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November
Eugenio Beltrami $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1900}$$)$
Italian mathematician notable for his work concerning differential geometry and mathematical physics.
The first to prove consistency of non-Euclidean geometry by modeling it on a surface of constant curvature, the pseudosphere, and in the interior of an $n$-dimensional unit sphere.
Developed singular value decomposition for matrices, which has been subsequently rediscovered several times.
His use of differential calculus for problems of mathematical physics indirectly influenced development of tensor calculus by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita.
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December
Louis Saalschütz $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1913}$$)$
Prussian mathematician known for his contributions to number theory and mathematical analysis.
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Felice Casorati $($$\text {1835}$ – $\text {1890}$$)$
Italian mathematician best known for the Casorati-Weierstrass Theorem in complex analysis.
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1836
1837
March
Richard Anthony Proctor $($$\text {1837}$ – $\text {1888}$$)$
English astronomer who was the founder of the journal Knowledge.
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April
Paul Albert Gordan $($$\text {1837}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$
German mathematician who worked in invariant theory and algebraic geometry.
Best known for his proof of his finite base theorem.
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1838
January
Marie Ennemond Camille Jordan $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
French mathematician who founded much of the field of group theory.
Also wrote the influential textbook Cours d'Analyse.
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February
Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {1916}$$)$
Physicist and philosopher of the Austrian empire.
Noted for his study of shock waves.
Major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism.
Through his criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
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June
Heinrich Menge $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {c. 1904}$$)$
German classical scholar and high school teacher, who contributed towards the documentation of the ancient history of mathematics.
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Karl Theodor Reye $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$
German mathematician who contributed to geometry, particularly projective geometry and synthetic geometry.
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July
Georges Pfeffermann $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {1914}$$)$
German amateur mathematician who did a lot of work on magic squares and multiplicative magic squares.
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October
William Carmichael McIntosh $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {1931}$$)$
Scottish physician and marine zoologist.
Served as president of the Ray Society, and as vice-president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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December
Edwin Abbott Abbott $($$\text {1838}$ – $\text {1926}$$)$
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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1839
February
Josiah Willard Gibbs $($$\text {1839}$ – $\text {1903}$$)$
American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Also well-known for his work in statistical mechanics.
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Hermann Hankel $($$\text {1839}$ – $\text {1873}$$)$
German mathematician who worked on complex numbers and quaternions.
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March
Joseph-Émile Barbier $($$\text {1839}$ – $\text {1889}$$)$
French astronomer and mathematician, best known for Barbier's Theorem on the perimeter of curves of constant width.
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June
Julius Petersen $($$\text {1839}$ – $\text {1910}$$)$
Danish mathematician who worked on many areas of mathematics and wrote several textbooks.
Perhaps best known for the Petersen graph.
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September
Charles Sanders Peirce $($$\text {1839}$ – $\text {1914}$$)$
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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December
Gustav Roch $($$\text {1839}$ – $\text {1866}$$)$
German mathematician who made significant contributions to the theory of Riemann surfaces.
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1840
February
William Allen Whitworth $($$\text {1840}$ – $\text {1905}$$)$
English mathematician who founded the journal Messenger of Mathematics with Charles Taylor.
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March
Franz Mertens $($$\text {1840}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$
Polish mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory.
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May
Charles Taylor $($$\text {1840}$ – $\text {1908}$$)$
English Hebraist who also wrote several works on geometry.
Founded the journal Messenger of Mathematics with William Allen Whitworth.
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October
Joseph Jean Baptiste Neuberg $($$\text {1840}$ – $\text {1926}$$)$
Luxembourger mathematician who worked primarily in geometry.
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November
Émile Michel Hyacinthe Lemoine $($$\text {1840}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$
French mathematician and civil engineer who worked mainly in geometry.
He is best known for defining the Lemoine point of a triangle.
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December
Carl Johannes Thomae $($$\text {1840}$ – $\text {1921}$$)$
German mathematician who worked in function theory.
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$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1850}$
1841
January
Samuel Loyd $($$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1911}$$)$
American chess player, chess composer, puzzle author, and recreational mathematician.
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March
Marie Alfred Cornu $($$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1902}$$)$
French physicist best known in mathematical circles for the Cornu spiral.
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August
Leo August Pochhammer $($$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$
German mathematician known for his work on special functions.
Also known for the Pochhammer symbol.
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November
Charles-Ange Laisant $($$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$
French politician and mathematician who published some books and founded some journals.
Determined the number of digits in $9^{9^9}$.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ernst Schröder $($$\text {1841}$ – $\text {1902}$$)$
German mathematician active mainly in the field of algebraic logic.
He is best known for his contribution to what is now known as the Cantor-Bernstein-Schröder Theorem.
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1842
Allan Joseph Champneys Cunningham $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1928}$$)$
English military man who studied number theory after leaving the army.
Used his expertise to find factors in numbers such as Mersenne numbers and Fermat numbers.
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March
Wilhelm Jordan $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1899}$$)$
German geodeist who conducted surveys in Germany and Africa and founded the German geodesy journal.
Remembered for Gauss-Jordan elimination, a version of Gaussian elimination with improved stability, for minimizing the squared error in the sum of a series of surveying observations.
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Joseph Valentin Boussinesq $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$
French mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to the theory of hydrodynamics, vibration, light, and heat.
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April
François Édouard Anatole Lucas $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his study of the Fibonacci numbers. As a result of his researches, discovered what are now known as the Lucas numbers.
In $1876$, proved that the Mersenne number $M_{127}$ is prime, and discovered that $M_{67}$ is actually composite.
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May
Heinrich Martin Weber $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1913}$$)$
German mathematician who worked in algebra, number theory, analysis and applications of analysis to mathematical physics.
Formulated the ring axioms.
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July
Otto Stolz $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1905}$$)$
Austrian mathematician working mainly in analysis and the theory of infinitesimals.
Corresponded with Felix Klein on the subject of the Erlangen program, among other subjects.
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August
Jean-Gaston Darboux $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1917}$$)$
French mathematician who contributed to to geometry and mathematical analysis.
Did considerable important work on linear partial differential equations.
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Osborne Reynolds $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$
Irish mathematician and physicist who was an innovator in the understanding of fluid dynamics.
His studies of heat transfer between solids and fluids brought improvements in boiler and condenser design.
Best known for introducing the Reynolds number for classifying fluid flow.
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September
Alexander Wilhelm von Brill $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$
German mathematician best known for his involvement with Felix Klein in the reform of the teaching of mathematics.
Made significant contributions to the field of algebraic geometry.
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November
John William Strutt $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$
English physicist who won the $1904$ Nobel Prize in Physics with William Ramsay for the discovery of argon.
Discovered the phenomenon now called Rayleigh Scattering, which explains why the sky is blue.
Predicted the existence of Rayleigh waves.
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December
Marius Sophus Lie $($$\text {1842}$ – $\text {1899}$$)$
Norwegian mathematician famous for his study of continuous transformation groups.
Such objects are now called Lie groups.
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1843
January
Giulio Ascoli $($$\text {1843}$ – $\text {1896}$$)$
Italian mathematician who made contributions to the theory of functions of a real variable and to Fourier series.
Introduced the concept of equicontinuity.
Best known for his contribution towards the Arzelà-Ascoli Theorem.
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Karl Hermann Amandus Schwarz $($$\text {1843}$ – $\text {1921}$$)$
German mathematician known for his work in the field of complex analysis.
Student of Weierstrass.
Best known for his contribution to the Cauchy-Bunyakovsky-Schwarz Inequality.
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September
Gaston Tarry $($$\text {1843}$ – $\text {1913}$$)$
Amateur French mathematician whose most famous achievement was confirming in $1901$ that no $6 \times 6$ Graeco-Latin square is possible.
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November
Moritz Pasch $($$\text {1843}$ – $\text {1930}$$)$
German mathematician who specialized in the foundations of geometry.
His work served as the inspiration for work by Giuseppe Peano and David Hilbert in their work to re-axiomise the field of geometry.
Best known for his formulation of what is now known as Pasch's Axiom.
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December
Paul Tannery $($$\text {1843}$ – $\text {1904}$$)$
French mathematician and historian best known for his work on the history of Greek mathematics.
Edited the works of Diophantus, Fermat and Descartes.
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1844
February
Jacob Lüroth $($$\text {1844}$ – $\text {1910}$$)$
German mathematician who proved Lüroth's Theorem and introduced Lüroth quartics.
Discovered what is now known as Student t-distribution before Gosset.
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Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann $($$\text {1844}$ – $\text {1906}$$)$
Austrian physicist and philosopher.
Best known for his work on the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics.
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June
Paul Mansion $($$\text {1844}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$
Belgian mathematician, editor of the journal Mathesis: Recueil Mathématique.
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September
Max Noether $($$\text {1844}$ – $\text {1921}$$)$
German mathematician notable for his work in algebraic geometry and algebraic functions.
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1845
March
Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$
Russian-born German mathematician widely regarded as the creator of set theory.
He established the importance of correspondence between sets and helped to define the concepts of infinity and well-ordered sets.
He is also famous for stating and proving Cantor's Theorem.
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Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1923}$$)$
German mechanical engineer and physicist who discovered X-rays.
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May
William Kingdon Clifford $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1879}$$)$
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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Pierre René Jean Baptiste Henri Brocard $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
French meteorologist and mathematician, in particular a geometer.
Best known for the Brocard points, the Brocard circle and the Brocard triangle.
Also known for the still unsolved Brocard's Problem.
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September
Émile Baudot $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1903}$$)$
French telegraph engineer and one of the pioneers of telecommunications.
Inventor of the Baudot code.
Invented a multiplexed printing telegraph system that used his code, and allowed multiple transmissions over a single line.
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November
Ulisse Dini $($$\text {1845}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$
Italian mathematician and politician, best known for his contributions to real analysis.
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1846
March
Magnus Gustaf Mittag-Leffler $($$\text {1846}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$
Swedish mathematician whose mathematical contributions are connected chiefly with the theory of functions.
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June
Johann Gustav Hermes $($$\text {1846}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$
German mathematician best known for his attempted construction of the regular $65 \, 537$-gon.
Recent research suggests that there may be mistakes in this construction.
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Eugen Otto Erwin Netto $($$\text {1846}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$
German mathematician known for his work in group theory.
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1847
March
Alexander Graham Bell $($$\text {1847}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone.
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Cesare Arzelà $($$\text {1847}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$
Italian mathematician who worked in the theory of functions.
Best known for his contribution towards the Arzelà-Ascoli Theorem.
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May
Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing $($$\text {1847}$ – $\text {1923}$$)$
German mathematician who made important contributions to the theories of Lie algebras, Lie groups, and non-Euclidean geometry.
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July
Andrew Gray $($$\text {1847}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$
Scots mathematician and physicist who worked on electromagnetism, dynamics and Bessel functions.
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September
William Symes Andrews $($$\text {1847}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$
English electrical engineer who was one of the first employees of the General Electric Company.
Known in the mathematical world for his exploration of magic squares and magic cubes.
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December
Achille Marie Gaston Floquet $($$\text {1847}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$
French mathematician best known for his work in analysis, especially in theory of differential equations.
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1848
January
Heinrich Suter $($$\text {1848}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
Swiss historian of science specializing in Islamic mathematics and astronomy.
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March
Diederik Johannes Korteweg $($$\text {1848}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$
Dutch mathematician best remembered for his work on the Korteweg-de Vries equation, together with Gustav de Vries.
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June
Henry Sinclair Hall $($$\text {1848}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$
English mathematician best known for his text books.
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July
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto $($$\text {1848}$ – $\text {1923}$$)$
Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher.
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September
Georges Fontené $($$\text {1848}$ – $\text {1928}$$)$
French mathematician who worked in geometry, analytic geometry, linear algebra, elliptic functions and elliptic integrals.
Also studied hyperspaces and "courbes gauches".
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November
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege $($$\text {1848}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$
German philosopher, logician, and mathematician, one of the founders of modern logic.
Made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics.
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1849
April
Felix Christian Klein $($$\text {1849}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$
German mathematician best known for his work establishing the connections between geometry and group theory.
Architect of the Erlangen program, which classifies geometries according to their symmetry groups.
Noted for the Klein bottle and the Klein $4$-group.
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July
Alfred Bray Kempe $($$\text {1849}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
English mathematician best known for his work on linkages and the Four Color Theorem.
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Robert Forsyth Scott $($$\text {1849}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$
Scots mathematician and barrister, best known for his textbook on determinants.
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October
Ferdinand Georg Frobenius $($$\text {1849}$ – $\text {1917}$$)$
German mathematician best known for his work on differential equations and group theory.
Gave the first full proof of the Cayley-Hamilton Theorem.
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November
Horace Lamb $($$\text {1849}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$
English applied mathematician and author of several influential texts on classical physics.
Coined the word vorticity in $1916$.
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December
Gyula Kőnig $($$\text {1849}$ – $\text {1913}$$)$
Hungarian mathematician best known nowadays for his work in the embryonic field of set theory.
Was opposed to the work of Cantor and spent much effort trying to disprove his work.
Father of Dénes Kőnig.
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1850
B. Nicolò I. Paganini $($$\text {c. 1850}$ – $\text {?}$$)$
Italian amateur mathematician known now only for his discovery of the $2$nd amicable pair $1184$ and $1210$.
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January
Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya $($$\text {1850}$ – $\text {1891}$$)$
In Russian: Со́фья Васи́льевна Ковале́вская.
The first female Russian mathematician of record.
Made contributions to analysis, differential equations and mechanics.
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May
Oliver Heaviside $($$\text {1850}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$
Largely self-taught English mathematician and physicist who was one of the pioneers in the field of electrical engineering.
Invented a considerable amount of the mathematics and terminology used in electromagnetism.
Significantly developed the theory of operational calculus, which are still used in modern-day mathematics in the context of Laplace transforms.
Developed a vector calculus independent of that of Josiah Willard Gibbs, completely independent of him.
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Ludwig Stickelberger $($$\text {1850}$ – $\text {1936}$$)$
Swiss mathematician who made important contributions to linear algebra and algebraic number theory.
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Wooster Woodruff Beman $($$\text {1850}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$
American mathematician best known for his text books and translations.
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June
Jørgen Pedersen Gram $($$\text {1850}$ – $\text {1916}$$)$
Danish actuary and mathematician working mostly in the field of statistics.
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August
Walter William Rouse Ball $($$\text {1850}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$
English mathematician, lawyer, and amateur magician.
Best known for his accounts of the history of mathematics.
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September
Alfred Pringsheim $($$\text {1850}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$
German mathematician and patron of the arts, best known for Pringsheim's Theorem.
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