2 minute read
Mathematician Sketches
Who Are Mathematicians?
Alberto Pedro Calderón
Alberto Pedro Calderón (1920–1998) was an Argentinian mathematician. He founded the Chicago school of mathematical analysis along with his mentor, Antoni Zygmund. Dr. Calderón studied a special kind of equation called a partial differential equation. This equation can be used to describe many things, like the way water moves when you drop a stone into a pond or how the heat moves through a room after a heater is turned on. Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was an American mathematician. She worked with NASA to calculate how to launch rockets so they would reach space! Her calculations were critical in ensuring that the first Americans to travel to space did so safely and successfully. She also worked on flights to the Moon and on plans for a mission to Mars.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing (1912–1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, and philosopher. His work on code-breaking was important to the success of the Allies (Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, United States, and China) in World War II. Because of his work, the Allies were able to build a machine that decoded German military communications. He also wrote about the idea of artificial intelligence and proposed an experiment now known as the Turing Test to help people determine if a computer is intelligent. Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) was an Indian mathematician. He was largely self-taught, having almost no formal mathematical training. Even so, he made substantial contributions to what we know about mathematics–because of his lack of training, not in spite of it. He was able to see mathematics in his own way and approach problems with new and novel ideas, allowing him to solve many problems that had stumped the great mathematicians of his time.
Mariel Vázquez
Mariel Vázquez is a Mexican mathematical biologist. This means she uses her mathematical knowledge to study problems in biology, the science of living things. She specializes in a field called the topology of DNA. Topology is a special kind of math that studies shapes. DNA is a chemical that can be thought of as the recipe for how to make a living creature. Dr. Vázquez uses mathematics to study the shape of DNA so we can better understand how different creatures are made.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was an English mathematician and writer. She is thought to have been the first person to recognize how useful computers could be! She realized that computers could be used for more than calculations, like adding and subtracting, and she wrote the first computer program (on paper!). However, the actual machines that could run such a program wouldn’t be invented until years after her death.
