I had a discussion with some friends on this topic, so forum: Who is your favourite mathematician and why?

of course there are a few right answers and the others are wrong.

Who's your favorite mathematican?

My girlfriend. She calculates all of my love I have for her and divides it by 2. The outcome is always positive.

Srinivasa Ramanujan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

toss-up between Turing and Russell

As for why, well, their contributions to the sort of math I enjoy. And it's ridiculously cool that we have all this stuff built on top of the simple idea that machines can do math.

Artilerists and snipers are one of the best mathematicians.
(yea, you need maths in this jobs )

God.

I respect Ted Kaczynski a fair bit... its a pity what he was moulded into becoming.

While maths is something were special I wouldn't say I had a Favourite Mathematician; If I had to say one perhaps my old GSCE maths teacher who taught me the enjoyment of it.

Living? Terence Tao, though I'm biased, because I'm a number theory fan. Historically maybe Kolmogorov or Markov.

knyte well done you gave the correct answer.

James Maxwell, Archimedes and Euler were also awesome

Évariste Galois. The guy died at age 20, after losing a pistol duel he had been challenged to, and couldn't refuse because it was for the love of a girl. The legend has it that he invented Group Theory (or at least wrote it down) the night before the duel.

@sze: holy shit I totally forgot Markov. And Gauss. How could I forget Gauss?!

Galois is obviously the correct answer.

Though I am fond of l'Hôpital for getting Bernoulli to do all his work for him :P

Edited 12/7/2015 18:51:43

My favorite mathematician is Erdős.

Edit: I also like Terry Tao for many of the reasons I like Erdős - he has a wide, direct impact by working with many people, he has good results in a several different areas - including harmonic analysis, analytic or combinatorial number theory, combinatorial geometry, applied math (compressed sensing), partial differential equations, probably many more that I don't know about.

I guess for analytic number theory specifically, the top guys are Peter Sarnak, Henryk Iwaniec, and John Friedlander.

Edited 12/7/2015 20:08:00

I would probably say Bernoulli. He had some pioneering work in statistics, plus he was instrumental in the foundation of the kinetic theory of gasses.

Albert Einstein

Nursultan Nazarbayev

Actually, I would like to change my vote to Lamar Smith. He has a wide-ranging and deep understanding of all of the basic sciences, including mathematics, that makes him more qualified to judge which specific projects are worth funding by the NSF than the so-called "expert" reviewers that are typically tapped for that job.

I haven't yet seen the name Fermat in this thread, but he should be in it. And with him comes of course Andrew Wiles.

Edited 12/8/2015 19:14:50

I like Pascal

I would have to say Alan Turing or John von Neumann for their major contributions to mathematics and computer science.