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Sonia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) was born into a noble
Russian family and due to her gender had to overcome many obstacles in
order to pursue her interest in mathematics. Barred from matriculating
at Heidelberg, she audited lectures and later studied privately with Weierstrass,
receiving a doctorate (in absentia) from Goettingen for an important paper
on partial differential equations. Still, academic appointments eluded
her. In 1884 she did obtain a position in Stockholm, thereafter winning
honors and prizes, including the Prix Bordin in France. (Detail) |
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Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev (1821-1894) was a Russian
mathematician working in number theory, particularly with prime numbers.
(Detail) |
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Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) was an Indian mathematician
who was largely self-taught, deriving independently some work of Gauss
and Riemann. G.H. Hardy at Cambridge sponsored the brilliant young mathematician,
whose notebooks of original discoveries are being published and are a
source of inspiration to other mathematicians. (Detail) |
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Waclaw Sierpinski (1882-1969), a Polish mathematician working in number
theory and set theory, described the self-repeating, or fractal design
shown on the Finnish stamp at left. Sierpinski triangles are created by
connecting the the midpoints of the sides of a triangle to form four smaller,
interior triangles, and then repeating this process for each of the outside
three triangles, ad infinitum. A Hungarian stamp commemorating a mathematical
congress shows a design of Sierpinski pyramids, with Michelangelo's hand
of God from the Sistine Chapel ceiling thrown in for good measure.A full
description of the Polish School of Mathematics appears here.
Some of its illustrious members included in a set with Sierpinski are
Stanislaw Zaremba (1863-1942), Stefan Banach (1892-1945), and Zygmunt
Janiszewski (1888-1920). |
