Famous Mathematicians

Dr James Grime takes an Enigma machine in to schools. Here he describes how the code-breaking work of Turing and his contemporaries helped to win the war.

Florence Nightingale may be well known for her role as a nurse, but she was also an excellent mathematician, collecting and analysing data to help improve hospital conditions.

Find out about Emmy Noether, whose ideas linked physics and algebra, and whom Einstein described as a 'creative mathematical genius'.

Read about Ada Lovelace, one of the pioneers of computer programming.

Pythagoras of Samos was a Greek philosopher who lived from about 580 BC to about 500 BC. Find out about the important developments he made in mathematics, astronomy, and the theory of music.

Have you ever wondered how maps are made? Or perhaps who first thought of the idea of designing maps? We're here to answer these questions for you.

Read this article to find out about the discoveries and inventions of Archimedes.

Have you ever noticed how mathematical ideas are often used in patterns that we see all around us? This article describes the life of Escher who was a passionate believer that maths and art can be intertwined.

Read all about Pythagoras' mathematical discoveries in this article written for students.

This article looks at the importance in mathematics of representing places and spaces mathematics. Many famous mathematicians have spent time working on problems that involve moving and mapping things.

Leonardo who?! Well, Leonardo is better known as Fibonacci and this article will tell you some of fascinating things about his famous sequence.

Read about David Hilbert who proved that any polygon could be cut up into a certain number of pieces that could be put back together to form any other polygon of equal area.

What would you do if your teacher asked you add all the numbers from 1 to 100? Find out how Carl Gauss responded when he was asked to do just that.

Second of two articles about Fibonacci, written for students.

First of two articles about Fibonacci, written for students.

This short article gives an outline of the origins of Morse code and its inventor and how the frequency of letters is reflected in the code they were given.