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Timeline of Mathematics
- edge17 6y agoVery cool. What do the different colors for the dots refer to though?
- alderz 6y agoLooking at the CSS classes, it references the procedence of the mathematician: (North) America is green, Middle East orange, Asia red, and so on. Tao is the only blue: he is from Oceania (Australia.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- neolog 6y agoA timeline of mathematical innovations would also be interesting.
- roenxi 6y agoPay close attention to the x axis because the scale here is highly misleading. The width of 100 years looks like it might be different each century.
- kristopolous 6y agoI think it was done "right". The longer ago you go the less robust our documentation of it so compressing sparse records to make it more navigable is way more usable than vast swaths of empty pages of scrolling. I also appreciate how they aren't really connected to each other to suggest a linear timeline of events. Nobody had infinite comprehension of all historical knowledge and simply hoisted themselves upon the shoulders of everything that came before. Reality is super messy. Almost as messy as a jumble of people on a screen
- rsj_hn 6y agoStrange to have non-researchers or non-mathematicians like Lewis Carrol, Ada Lovelace, or Anna Easly included while world-impacting researchers such as Shigefumi Mori, S.T. Yau, Yuri Manin, Stefan Banach, Simon Donaldson, R. Bott, M. Morse, H. Lebesgue, O. Heaviside, J. Leray, J. Tate, E. Calabi, M. Gromov, <strike>G. Perelman</strike>, F. Adams, H. Kunneth, are left out. Where are they getting their lists of people? It seems they classify anyone famous who was "technical" as a mathematician, which is the only reason why I can think of including people like Einstein, Lewis Carroll, or Ada Lovelace (none of whom made any contribution to math) as mathematicians, but leaving out those who made major advances.
- cjv 6y agoVery ignorant comment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll#Mathematical_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll#Mathematical_wor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#First_computer_pr...
- rsj_hn 6y agoYou're kinda making my point. None of these are actually contributions to mathematical research. A computer program is not mathematical research, nor are field equations in physics. Which is not to say that they are not noteworthy achievements, but it is to say that they are not achievements in mathematics. These three made contributions in other fields. I am not saying they don't deserve fame in the fields of physics or computer science or literature. They certainly do. But they deserve no fame in the field of mathematics, anymore than Morse deserves fame in the field of computer science, or Gromov deserves fame in the field of literature (but he did write books!). The only person in your list of three who could even be called a mathematician was Dodgson, but his contributions are not considered noteworthy enough to make any kind of timeline.
- User23 6y agoComputing science is doing to mathematics what the physical sciences did to philosophy. Within a couple generations “mathematicians” will be a set consisting solely of charlatans and incompetents while the real work is done with formal methods.
- 3v1n0 6y agoQuite relevant here: > Al-Khwarizmi also worked in astronomy and geography, and the word “algorithm” is named after him.
- 3v1n0 6y agoAh and also, gave name to the word algebra
- joefourier 6y ago> Daubechies studied different types of wavelets, which are now an essential part of image compression formats like JPEG. Minor correction but the discrete wavelet transform based on Daubechies' work is used in JPEG2000, not JPEG, which uses the discrete cosine transform (other codecs generally use related integer approximations). JPEG2000 never managed to gain much popularity outside of digital cinema (e.g. Red RAW, Cineform, and I believe delivery codecs for cinemas). Which is a shame, given that wavelets have superior properties for multi-resolution decomposition.
- jacobolus 6y agoJPEG-2000 and another wavelet-based codec MrSID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MrSID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MrSID are used for archival storage of high-resolution scans, e.g. by the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/compression.html http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/compression.html JPEG has the big advantages that it is built in to web browsers, can be decoded effectively on less powerful hardware, and is “good enough” for most typical uses.
- 3v1n0 6y agoIt can be known, but it's quite crazy how in the western world since the Greek period to the Renaissance, there was basically no big impact on the theoretical side (at least). Then the banks (and so some Italians) arrived and it all got more relevant.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoSome missing names... al-Tusi, Poisson, Dirichlet, Weierstrass, Bessel.
- User23 6y agoMinkowski is another huge one.
- rmak 6y agoClaude Shanon
- 29athrowaway 6y agoShannon is already present in the timeline.
- diplodocusaur 6y agohttps://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/
- Graffur 6y agoAwesome, just went down a rabbit hole after clicking on Thales of Miletus. Really nice site explaining the basics of geometry. Unfortunately I quickly got to some "COMING SOON" sections
- rq1 6y agoThe most important names are actually missing.
- imvetri 6y agoits must be there, search for the names, the tiles must have been collapsed
- readme 6y agonice I wish they would add some of the arab mathematicians algebra is an arabic word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_in_medieval_Islam
- danielam 6y agoThey did. Check again.
- ac42 6y agoI was somewhat disappointed to find a timeline of mathematicians instead of a smart way to capture the evolution of mathematics. Pretty design for what it does, though!
- mongol 6y agoI like this visualization. There is an Android app called History Timeline which has a similar concept but a much broader scope, and links to Wikipedia articles. I think it is a great way to explore history and see when similar events occurred that are not usually talked about in same context.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- amirkdv 6y agoTaking the countries of origin of the mathematicians chosen here as a proxy for the amount of "mathematics done" in each region shows a few patterns. Notably the explosion of math in Europe from the 1500s. I wonder if the printing revolution had something to do with this. Gutenberg died in ~ 1470
- nrkumar93 6y agoAnd where is Ramanujan???
- imvetri 6y agoits there, search for ramanujan or look at bottom starting of 1900
- stuzenz 6y agoThis site is amazing. I love it. As a side project, while teaching my kids, I have been building a site for using python for maths for the same target audience (10 - 16 year olds). I plan on continuing to add to it as I give 1-to-1 support to my kids. Having started on the project for about a month now, I have an appreciation for the amount of care that has gone into that the mathigon site. Kudos to them for providing such a high quality free resource for building passion and education in maths. In relation to people commenting that some names are missing and some are not specifically mathematicians etc. It doesn't matter - the project is ongoing, the learning resources have plenty that are still in construction - and any name mentioned sits somewhere in the realm of math interest. It is a great site. Very polished.
- bojanvidanovic 6y agoGreat visualization! I'm just finishing reading the book on prime numbers, titled "the music of the primes" and this visualization reminds me how I wish Riemann lived a little bit longer.
- peignoir 6y agoI understand the difficulty of the exercice and hopefully more people can be added i was for example surprised to see some names who had minor contributions while so many missing like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kingdon_Clifford https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kingdon_Clifford
- tusharvjoshi 6y agoSome missing Indian names: Budhayana 800 BCE [1][2] Mahaviracharya 9 CE [3] Actually Wikipedia has a list of Indian Mathematician from which I see many names are not in this page [4] References: [1] https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Baudhayana/ https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Baudhayana... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudhayana_sutras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudhayana_sutras [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah%C4%81v%C4%ABra_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mah%C4%81v%C4%ABra_(mathematic... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_mathematicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_mathematicians
- apricot 6y agoOne amazing thing to me is how you can go from the beginnings of calculus to today in only five jumps from mathematicians who were alive at the same time, e.g. Newton — Euler — Gauss — Poincaré — Turing — Yau An old C. F. Gauss could have met baby Henri Poincaré, yet in my mind they live in completely different universes.
- hilbert42 6y agoHum, the very first entry I searched for—Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro—wasn't there! Remember Ricci curvature is crucial mathematics in Einstein's Field Equations so Ricci-Curbastro ought to be there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_curvature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_curvature. This all looks very pretty and it's likely useful for teaching but it begs the question of how good the input data is. The old adage about garbage in, garbage out is true no matter the source.