Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 – c.

 495 BC) was an ancient

Ionian Greek philosopher and the eponymous founder of
Pythagoreanism. His political and religious teachings were
well known in Magna Graecia and influenced the
philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and, through them,
Western philosophy. Knowledge of his life is clouded by
legend, but he appears to have been the son of
Mnesarchus, a seal engraver on the island of Samos.
Modern scholars disagree regarding Pythagoras's
education and influences, but they do agree that, around
530 BC, he travelled to Croton, where he founded a
school in which initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived
a communal, ascetic lifestyle. This lifestyle entailed a
number of dietary prohibitions, traditionally said to have
included vegetarianism, although modern scholars doubt that he ever advocated for complete
vegetarianism.

The teaching most securely identified with Pythagoras is metempsychosis, or the "transmigration of
souls", which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. He may have
also devised the doctrine of musica universalis, which holds that the planets move according to
mathematical equations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. Scholars debate
whether Pythagoras developed the numerological and musical teachings attributed to him, or if those
teachings were developed by his later followers, particularly Philolaus of Croton. Following Croton's
decisive victory over Sybaris in around 510 BC, Pythagoras's followers came into conflict with supporters
of democracy and Pythagorean meeting houses were burned. Pythagoras may have been killed during
this persecution, or escaped to Metapontum, where he eventually died.

In antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the
Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the
sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus. It was said
that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher ("lover of wisdom") and that he was the first to
divide the globe into five climatic zones. Classical historians debate whether Pythagoras made these
discoveries, and many of the accomplishments credited to him likely originated earlier or were made by
his colleagues or successors. Some accounts mention that the philosophy associated with Pythagoras
was related to mathematics and that numbers were important, but it is debated to what extent, if at all,
he actually contributed to mathematics or natural philosophy.

Pythagoras influenced Plato, whose dialogues, especially his Timaeus, exhibit Pythagorean teachings.
Pythagorean ideas on mathematical perfection also impacted ancient Greek art. His teachings
underwent a major revival in the first century BC among Middle Platonists, coinciding with the rise of
Neopythagoreanism. Pythagoras continued to be regarded as a great philosopher throughout the Middle
Ages and his philosophy had a major impact on scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler,
and Isaac Newton. Pythagorean symbolism was used throughout early modern European esotericism
and his teachings as portrayed in Ovid's Metamorphoses influenced the modern vegetarian movement.
 Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June
1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician,
cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Turing was
highly influential in the development of theoretical computer
science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm
and computation with the Turing machine, which can be
considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is
widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer
science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments,
he was never fully recognized in his home country during his
lifetime due to his homosexuality, which was then a crime in the
UK.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government
Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's
codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was
responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here he devised a number of techniques for speeding the
breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an
electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a pivotal role
in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial
engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Counterfactual
history is difficult with respect to the effect Ultra intelligence had on the length of the war, but at the
upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and
saved over 14 million lives.

After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the ACE, among the
first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine
Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester
computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of
morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction,
first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when by the Labouchere Amendment, "gross
indecency" was a criminal offence in the UK. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an
alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An
inquest determined his death as suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also
consistent with accidental poisoning. In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling
way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law
is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men
cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual act.
 René Descartes (/deɪˈkɑːrt/, UK also /ˈdeɪkɑːrt/; French: [ʁəne
dekaʁt]; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form:
"Cartesian";31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French
philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the
Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–49) of his life
in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States
Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder
of the United Provinces. He is generally considered one of the
most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age.

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) continues to be

a standard text at most university philosophy departments.
Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the
Cartesian coordinate system (see below) was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical
geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, used in the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and
analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.

Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. He frequently set his views apart
from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, an early modern
treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had
written on these matters before". His best known philosophical statement is "I think, therefore I am"
(French: Je pense, donc je suis; Latin: Ego cogito, ergo sum), found in Discourse on the Method (1637;
written in French and Latin) and Principles of Philosophy (1644; written in Latin).

Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the
16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the
schools on two major points: first, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form;
second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his
theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of creation.

Descartes laid the foundation for 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Spinoza and
Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and
Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes were all well-versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and
Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.
 Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (/ɡaʊs/; German: Gauß ˈkaɐɐl ˈfʁiːdʁɪç
ˈɡaʊs]; Latin: Carolus Fridericus Gauss; (30 April 1777 – 23
February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who
made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and
sciences. Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum
(Latin for "the foremost of mathematicians") and "the greatest
mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had an exceptional
influence in many fields of mathematics and science, and is
ranked among history's most influential mathematicians.

Gauss was a child prodigy. In his memorial on Gauss, Wolfgang

Sartorius von Waltershausen says that when Gauss was barely
three years old he corrected a math error his father made; and
that when he was seven, he confidently solved an arithmetic
series problem faster than anyone else in his class of 100
students. Many versions of this story have been retold since that time with various details regarding
what the series was – the most frequent being the classical problem of adding all the integers from 1 to
100. There are many other anecdotes about his precocity while a toddler, and he made his first
groundbreaking mathematical discoveries while still a teenager. He completed his magnum opus,
Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, in 1798, at the age of 21—though it was not published until 1801. This work
was fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline and has shaped the field to the present
day.

Gauss's intellectual abilities attracted the attention of the Duke of Brunswick, who sent him to the
Collegium Carolinum (now Braunschweig University of Technology), which he attended from 1792 to
1795, and to the University of Göttingen from 1795 to 1798. While at university, Gauss independently
rediscovered several important theorems. His breakthrough occurred in 1796 when he showed that a
regular polygon can be constructed by compass and straightedge if the number of its sides is the product
of distinct Fermat primes and a power of 2. This was a major discovery in an important field of
mathematics; construction problems had occupied mathematicians since the days of the Ancient Greeks,
and the discovery ultimately led Gauss to choose mathematics instead of philology as a career. Gauss
was so pleased with this result that he requested that a regular heptadecagon be inscribed on his
tombstone. The stonemason declined, stating that the difficult construction would essentially look like a
circle.

The year 1796 was more productive for both Gauss and number theory. He discovered a construction of
the heptadecagon on 30 March. He further advanced modular arithmetic, greatly simplifying
manipulations in number theory. On 8 April he became the first to prove the quadratic reciprocity law.
This remarkably general law allows mathematicians to determine the solvability of any quadratic
equation in modular arithmetic. The prime number theorem, conjectured on 31 May, gives a good
understanding of how the prime numbers are distributed among the integers.

Gauss also discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular
numbers on 10 July and then jotted down in his diary the note: "ΕΥΡΗΚΑ! num = Δ + Δ' + Δ". On 1
October he published a result on the number of solutions of polynomials with coefficients in finite fields,
which 150 years later led to the Weil conjectures.
 Leonhard Euler (/ˈɔɪlər/ OY-lər; German: [ˈɔɪlər] (About this
soundlisten); 15 April 1707 – 18 September 1783) was a Swiss
mathematician, physicist, astronomer, logician and engineer, who
made important and influential discoveries in many branches of
mathematics, such as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory,
while also making pioneering contributions to several branches
such as topology and analytic number theory. He also introduced
much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation,
particularly for mathematical analysis, such as the notion of a
mathematical function. He is also known for his work in
mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy, and music theory.

Euler was one of the most eminent mathematicians of the 18th

century and is held to be one of the greatest in history. He is also
widely considered to be the most prolific mathematician of all time. His collected works fill 60 to 80
quarto volumes, more than anybody in the field. He spent most of his adult life in Saint Petersburg,
Russia, and in Berlin, then the capital of Prussia.

A statement attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace expresses Euler's influence on mathematics: "Read Euler,
read Euler, he is the master of us all.

Euler worked in almost all areas of mathematics, such as geometry, infinitesimal calculus, trigonometry,
algebra, and number theory, as well as continuum physics, lunar theory and other areas of physics. He is
a seminal figure in the history of mathematics; if printed, his works, many of which are of fundamental
interest, would occupy between 60 and 80 quarto volumes. Euler's name is associated with a large
number of topics.

Euler is the only mathematician to have two numbers named after him: the important Euler's number in
calculus, e, approximately equal to 2.71828, and the Euler–Mascheroni constant γ (gamma) sometimes
referred to as just "Euler's constant", approximately equal to 0.57721. It is not known whether γ is
rational or irrational.

Euler introduced and popularized several notational conventions through his numerous and widely
circulated textbooks. Most notably, he introduced the concept of a function and was the first to write f(x)
to denote the function f applied to the argument x. He also introduced the modern notation for the
trigonometric functions, the letter e for the base of the natural logarithm (now also known as Euler's
number), the Greek letter Σ for summations and the letter i to denote the imaginary unit. The use of the
Greek letter π to denote the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter was also popularized by
Euler, although it originated with Welsh mathematician William Jones.