🧮The Greats

His algebra was written as a manual for practical life: its longest sections work out Islamic inheritance law, dividing estates among widows, sons and daughters in the prescribed shares, alongside problems of trade and canal-digging. When Robert of Chester translated the book into Latin in 1145, European scholars encountered equation-solving as a systematic discipline for the first time, and the Arabic al-jabr of his title hardened, through Spanish and Latin mouths, into the permanent name of the subject.

Euler lost his right eye in 1738 and nearly all remaining sight after a failed cataract operation in 1771, and simply reorganized: dictating to assistants around a table, he produced roughly half his life's output after going blind, remarking that he now had fewer distractions. On 18 September 1783 he spent the afternoon calculating the flight of the newly invented Montgolfier balloons and the orbit of the recently discovered planet Uranus, then collapsed mid-conversation with his family. Condorcet's eulogy ends: "he ceased to calculate and to live."

On 30 March 1796, the eighteen-year-old Gauss proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon can be constructed with compass and straightedge — the first advance on that classical problem in two thousand years — and by his own account the discovery decided him for mathematics over philology. He began his famous scientific diary the same week. He wanted a heptadecagon carved on his gravestone; the stonemason reportedly refused, saying it would be indistinguishable from a circle, so the memorial in his native Braunschweig bears a seventeen-pointed star instead.

At eighteen she contracted a fictitious marriage with the young paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, because an unmarried Russian woman could not travel abroad to study. Berlin's university refused to enroll her, so Karl Weierstrass — after testing her with problems set for his best students — taught her privately for four years. In 1874 Göttingen granted her a doctorate in absentia, summa cum laude, on three papers, one containing the Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem still taught today. No university in Europe would then hire her; Stockholm finally called in 1883.

In January 1913 Hardy received a nine-page letter from an unknown 25-year-old accounts clerk at the Madras Port Trust, containing roughly 120 theorems stated without proof. He and Littlewood sat down that evening to sort genius from delusion, and Hardy later wrote that the strangest formulas had to be true, "because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them." Within fifteen months Ramanujan was at Trinity College; in 1918, at thirty, he became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in its history.

When Göttingen's mathematicians moved to habilitate her in 1915, professors in other faculties objected to a woman lecturing; Hilbert answered a faculty meeting: "I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission. We are a university, not a bathhouse." He lost. For four years her courses were advertised under Hilbert's name with Noether as "assistant," until the postwar republic allowed her habilitation in 1919. Dismissed again in 1933 for being Jewish, she moved to Bryn Mawr College in the United States and died there after surgery eighteen months later.

As a schoolgirl she won gold at the 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong and returned in 1995 in Toronto to score a perfect 42 out of 42, the first Iranian student ever to do so. As a Stanford professor she worked slowly — she called herself a "slow" mathematician — sketching for hours on enormous sheets of paper spread across the floor, doodling figures around the edges of her calculations, so that her young daughter Anahita described her mother's work as "painting." She died of breast cancer in 2017, at forty, three years after the Seoul medal ceremony.