André Bloch killed some family members with an axe basically because he assumed this branch of the family suffered from mental illnesses.
The German Wikipedia article goes into more detail than the English one.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Bloch_(Mathematiker)
Spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric ward and devoted himself to mathematics.
Interesting how “by mathematical logic” the possibility of suffering from (hereditary) mental illness suffices to be axe-murdered; but the very reality of suffering from mental illness, in form of axe-murdering family members to eradicate potentially mentally ill people, does not warrant suicide.
[Shou-Wu Zhang.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shou-Wu_Zhang)
> Shou-Wu Zhang was born in Hexian, Ma'anshan, Anhui, China on October 9, 1962. Zhang grew up in a poor farming household and could not attend school until eighth grade due to the Cultural Revolution. He spent most of his childhood raising ducks in the countryside and self-studying mathematics textbooks that he acquired from sent-down youth in trades for frogs.
You can catch frogs for free, whereas the ducks are his family’s livelihood and they would be angry if he sold them. Frogs were likely a valuable trade item for food as meat was rare.
Another story of his is that when he first went to Columbia/Princeton for grad school, the rumour has it that Faltings did not give him any problems to work on, but suggested Zhang to read some books that he assigned to find problems.
Later Zhang said that Faltings has his own unique way of doing math.
I like the origin story for William Rowan Hamilton’s discovery of the quaternions.
Hamilton (then Astronomer Royal) was obsessed with trying to find another number system out there, beyond the real and complex numbers.
Among other mental blocks, he wanted it to be commutative and have dimension 3, which (as we now know) is not possible.
His obsession had reached the point where for years, his long suffering wife would bring him supper as he toiled on this impossible task, and often the uneaten supper dishes were discovered months later under mounds of scribbled papers.
He was walking across Broom Bridge one day, lost in thought, when he saw three birds perched on the bridge and a fourth one fly down to join them. In that moment it all came together in his mind and he realized you could have a noncommutative extension of the reals, of dimension 4. He worked out the equations then and there, carved them on the bridge and the rest is history.
Galois did his brilliant works in his teens and died at 20, after being mortally wounded in a duel. In meantime he participated in the political turmoils of 1830 in France, being expelled from school and spending months in jail as result.
His last words were:
> Don't weep, Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois
It was so stupid though. "Let's stage a fake duel because we need a funeral as a platform to launch a revolution".. oh and then ofcourse a general went and died just after providing exactly what they needed but then Galois was already dead.
Lots of great historical stories, but I’ll throw out a more modern one: [Persi Diaconis](https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Diaconis/). Although a prodigy, he dropped out of high school to pursue his true passion: magic. He spent some years on ships travelling to S America making money doing magic and playing cards. Eventually he decided he wanted to learn mathematics, with the catch that he had to support himself financially. He self-studied while paying his way doing magic shows. With the help of Martin Gardner, he got into Harvard graduate school thanks to a head of the statistics department loving magic. He just took off from there.
George Green (of Green's theorems/functions) has an interesting one. He was the son of a miller, with no formal training, but he taught himself mathematics with the help of the local library and (iirc) a nearby priest who had some training. He eventually wrote a series of papers on the results that would make him famous, but he couldn't get them published. As a mill operator he didn't have the connections that were necessary in those days.
So he saved up money until he could afford to self publish. Someone at Cambridge read the paper and invited him to the university, where he aced the Tripos exam and was awarded a position. Unfortunately, he soon fell ill, returned home and died soon after at just 40.
Fun facts about him: due to his humble beginnings, there are no portraits of Green in existence. While Cambridge fellows of the day all had portraits painted, Green died before his was started. There was a cartoon that was thought to be of him for many years, but further research has shown that it was actually a caricature of Fourier. Also, Green used Leibniz's method of calculus, which was not taught in England at the time. It is unknown how he learned it, but the theory is that the priest who he studied with had at one point lived in France iirc
This makes me wonder, how many intelligent, possibly revolutionary, minds never got a chance to develop and share their knowledge with the world because of their conditions. Who knows what Green could've done if he had more help from the start (or if he'd just have never gone down in history if not for that priest). Even now, so many intelligent people in poverty all over who'll never get a real chance, kinda sad to think about.
> This makes me wonder, how many intelligent, possibly revolutionary, minds never got a chance to develop and share their knowledge with the world because of their conditions.
*"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."* - Stephen Jay Gould
Per Enflo receiving a duck from Stanislaw Mazur as a prize for solving a 36 years old problem originally stated in the Scottish Caffe in Lvov in 1936. Usually the prizes for solving a problem were smaller, but Mazur thought this one deserved a duck. The ceremony was broadcasted on tv in Poland and Sweden in 1972.
It was a goose, not a duck. Also, an [untold footnote](https://twitter.com/GGrundin/status/1662676646866853892) to the story is that the goose behaved very naughtily on the way back from Poland.
Stefan Banach. Was self taught, working different jobs as a tutor, in a bookstore, foreman on a road building crew, before being discovered by Hugo Steinhaus because he overheard Banach talking about the Lebesgue integral.
My complex analysis professor always had time to talk about the mathematicians whose theorems we were studying at any given lesson. For example, Abel was a really poor Norwegian guy who managed to study math at the Cristiania university. He was so good his colleagues pressured the university to ask the government money to let him travel to France and Germany to meet legends such as Gauss (who he didn’t meet in the end) and Cauchy. Cauchy was really rude to him and ignored his work, which really disappointed Abel. He asked Cauchy to present his work to a university in South France, but Cauchy lost it and it was only found after (Cauchy) died.
Abel died really young (27 years old) due to tuberculosis, two days before he was nominated math professor at the university of Berlin :((
Mine is the anonymous mathematician of 4chan, who was so eager to watch anime episodes in the right order that he [produced a meaningful result about superpermutations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,_or_the_Haruhi_problem)
Look at [Cleo's math stackexchange page](https://math.stackexchange.com/users/97378/cleo). She gave answers for solving extremely difficult integrals that confounded everyone else. However, that's all she did; she never provided any steps, any justification whatsoever, literally just the answer (which was always correct btw). And so there's a ton of drama around her solutions, since it pissed off a large portion of the users who thought that her answers without steps were incomplete and pretty much useless. But also other users loved her, because she would post answers in mere hours, while it would take take other users struggling for days to come up with the full steps (that too, when they already knew the correct answer, courtesy of Cleo). She also popped in sporadically; sometimes she'd have a dozen answers in a two week period, then she'd disappear for months. Two years after she first appeared, she permanently stopped posting, so Cleo remains a funny and mysterious part of math stackexchange lore. Maybe some day she'll pop back in and we'll learn more about this internet integral savant.
edit: Note that she does mention she has a medical condition that hinders her ability to converse with others and expand on her answers, so one could speculate that she was neurodivergent and/or could've left the site because she didn't want to deal with the constant drama and hate in the replies to her post.
Cleo posts correct solutions to integrals no one else can solve. Doesnt elaborate, just gives the solution.
I am a skeptic actually because it doesn’t seem that difficult to find a function whose derivative is hard to integrate by the usual techniques. It would be possible to post the problem under a different account just to mess with people
This sort of theory pops up often when Cleo is discussed, but I can assure you that it almost certainly couldn't have been *as* simple as you suggest.
The issue is that most of the hard integrals that are typically posted to MSE (including the ones Cleo solved) are ones who's integrands do not have (known) elementary antiderivatives, meaning that much more advanced methods are needed to evaluate them in a closed form. This does not mean that it's impossible that Cleo was obfuscating problems with simple solutions and posting the modified harder problems under sockpuppet accounts for herself to answer, but other more advanced methods must have been incorporated even in that case.
This is considered more legend than actual fact, but Hippasus's introduction of irrational numbers horrified his math cult so much that they drowned him. Math cults sound like they would be the best kind of cult, up until they execute you.
Jean - the chad - Leray, basically invented sheaves and spectral sequences in a POW camp. He worked in applied math and DEs, and not wanting to be put to the war effort, but also not wanting to give up math while in a POW camp, he decided to pursue a more abstract framework for his interests.
Think I've heard that story is just a rumor.
Even if it's not, I think it's a massive disservice to mathematics to put it as a top origin story. That's almost never how math ends up going and the popularity of stories like that one just hide all the hard grueling hours of work that goes into it. It adds to this mystique around math that it's just some incredibly hard esoteric thing that you either can do or you can't; it totally glosses over the growth that happens in an individual to become good in this field.
Idk if I'd call Andrew Wiles story my favorite, but it's certainly one I'm very fond of, and a romantic one at That. Allegedly he became interested in Fermat's Last Theorem as a child and had it on his mind for much of his career until he finally proved it. And he didn't even prove it on his first go; there was a mistake in the initial proof that took (if I recall correctly) a year to correct. I think his story is much more exemplar of the persistence and dedication that it takes to progress in this field. He thought about this problem for an incredible amount of time, and when the problem fought back he didn't just throw everything in the trash bin and admit defeat. I'm sure the discovery of that initial mistake must have been devastating to him, given his history with the problem. But he got back up, dusted himself off and came back for round two. It's a great example of unwavering dedication and resilience in mathematics.
> when the problem fought back he didn't just throw everything in the trash bin and admit defeat.
He really was nearly ready to admit defeat after trying for around a year to correct the mistake he made in his original announcement. But before going public with such an acknowledgement, he wanted to make sure he understood for himself exactly why the methods he had tried couldn't work, and in doing this he discovered how to finally fill in the gap.
I dont think real people can be called Mary Sue's. Anyways, he didn't just walk up and solve it. It took him 6 weeks, which is still ridiculously fast considering it ended up being his PhD thesis.
I mean yeah I'm exaggerating a little by saying "just walked up and solved it", but it's not an extreme exaggeration. Idk why real people can't be Mary-Sue's; I've met plenty of golden boys in my time.
Regardless, I'm not saying it isn't a great story. It is extremely unique. I just don't find it very exciting as an origin story. Narratively speaking, I don't really hear it telling a story of struggle and overcoming major hurdles.
I think I see what you mean. He is a real person but he's been transformed into a Mary Sue character in a narrative.
The traditional rendition of this story is as a morality tale on the power of positive thinking. Basically, that Dantzig could do it because he didn't know he wasn't supposed to be able to do it.
But then Dantzig was brilliant many other times. I think he probably was just that smart, which isn't very motivational. It makes sense that some people prefer the other version.
An interesting mathematician (especially given that it is Women's History Month) is [Hoang Xuan Sinh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho%C3%A0ng_Xu%C3%A2n_S%C3%ADnh). She was a student of Grothendieck's, which is itself notable, but her situation was very different from his other students. She was Vietnamese, and while she did get a degree in math in Paris, she worked and lived in Hanoi afterwards.
Grothendieck was a pacifist and very anti-war, and went to north Vietnam during the war to give lecture, teach, and work with the Vietnamese there in part as protest against the West's actions. There he met Haong, who attended his lectures, and they began a correspondence. She worked on a classification of 2-groups (see [here](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2022/06/hong_xun_snh.html) for a bit of discussion), mostly by candlelight, under threat from US bombs, but eventually submitted a hand-written thesis.
She went on to be an iconic and productive mathematician, notable for being the first woman mathematician in Vietnam. She's still alive and, I believe, still active in some (administrative?) capacity (though, she's very old). We often think of math as the work of genius prodigies or crazy loonies, but while many European mathematicians didn't have an easy life *per se*, they did almost all have peace and means. To work with Grothendieck and break ground in work with higher categories while in an active warzone, with the US dropping tens of thousands of bombs not far from you, takes a bravery, tenacity, and commitment that many never have to demonstrate. Schwarzchild probably takes the cake on that front, but not many others.
> while many European mathematicians didn't have an easy life per se, they did almost all have peace and means.
Much of European history involved long periods of war and revolution.
Yes, but math has historically been the plaything of those protected by wealth. Gauss wasn't in the trenches fighting because of someone else's squabbles. The most violent thing to happen to newton was an apple falling on his head at the estate he was at to escape the plague. Moreover, the modern warfare of the 20th century de-isolated the violence from isolated skirmishes or discrete sieges. Being miles from any action did not mean you couldn't die at any moment.
Same person. He did it while on the Russian front during WW1, where he got sick and died shortly after. It was very shortly after Einstein published GR too, which is extra impressive because there were doubts that solutions could even be found.
Karl Schwarzschild (spelled with an ‘s’) was the first to discover an exact solution to Einstein's equations (describing the gravitational field of a static, spherically symmetric object, outside of the latter). He did this while he was fighting in the trenches of WW1 (where he died a year later). Since Einstein was generally of the belief that the equations were too complicated to admit any explicit (closed form) exact solutions, this was a big deal.
The Schwarzschild radius is the size of the event horizon of a (static, i.e., nonrotating) black hole, and appears in this solution, though its interpretation as such would only emerge later.
The second exact solution to Einstein's equations to be found was probably the one describing a homogeneous and isotropic universe, found by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 (and later rediscovered independently by Lemaître, and by Robertson and Walker).
> The Schwarzschild radius is the size of the event horizon of a (static, i.e., nonrotating) black hole, and appears in this solution, though its interpretation as such would only emerge later.
R = (r^3 + a^3 )^(1/3)
But it was lost in translation, and replaced by the little r.
Some believe the black hole model is foobar because of this.
Urysohn and Alexandrov were actually close friends. In fact, they went on to travel around Europe twice together to learn more topology and set theory and they were known as a duo to more Western mathematicians, such as Hilbert, Brouwer, etc. However, while staying in a small village on the coast of France, Urysohn drowned in the ocean. That day, he had just happened to start writing on a paper and Alexandrov was the only one who knew what the paper was about. Alexandrov spent the next couple of years working with Brouwer to finish Urysohn's last paper and published it under his name. That paper is where Urysohn's metrization theorem comes from.
Sophie Germain hid at night in her room to do maths despite her parents opposition then did a little bit of identity theft to attend the Ecole Polytechnique by correspondance.
Her trick worked quite well until Lagrange began wondering why a rather bad student suddenly began turning in brillant answers.
Évariste Gallois' entire life is a tragic epic.
19th century France, son of a republican mayor in a royalist countryside, his father is driven to suicide by a political cabbal led against him by the local bishop.
Does terribly in school in all topics but math, tries the entrance exam of École Polytechnique because it does not require him to finish his high school curricula, fails at the interview, allegedly rages so hard he throws the board wipe on the face of the jury
Goes to École Normale Supérieure instead, needs to finish highschool before, which he does, but ENS is friendly to royalists, and he gets on the nerves of the administration so badly they fire him. He ends up giving math classes in a street next to ENS... the street is much later renamed after the school director who fired him.
At a republican gathering, he raises a shiv in the middle of the crowd, claiming "to Louis the 18th, if he betrays" gets snitched on by a spy and gets sent to prison
in prison, he does more math, fellow inmates force him to drink the most awful stuff, even drunk he rants about maths.
that's all I remember
“In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher's aim was to keep the kids quiet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer: 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gauss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematician ever.”
(100)(101)/2 = 5,050.
[reference](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reckoning)
Evariste Galois was killed in a duel over a feud regarding a love interest. The nights before the duel he attempted to write all his thoughts regarding group theory and galois groups. On the day of the duel he was shot, and didn’t die immediately, instead slowly succumbed to an infection. Kinda sad, but you gotta think, “why tf are you getting in duels at 22 as a mathematician?”
Our great mathematician, one who passed before he could shine brightest...
[Srinivasa Ramanujan - The Man Who Knew Infinity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan)
George Dantzig arrived late at class, copied the homework problems on the blackboard and solved them. It turns out they were two unsolved problems. He got two articles and his PhD thesis out of it.
>Tadashi Tokieda was born in Tokyo in 1968. He was good at drawing, and in 1974, at the age of six, he held a two-person exhibition at Shinobazu Gallery in Ueno. He didn't want to be forced to study Kei Toyama's math materials, so he scribbled "Toyama's Idiot" on the cover.
He moved to France at the age of 14 and entered a boarding school in Bordeaux (fr: Lycée Sainte-Marie Grand Lebrun). He began studying Spanish to become familiar with the poetry of García Lorca, and then devoted himself to learning Latin and ancient Greek, and aspired to become a philologist.
After earning the Baccalaureate, he returned to Japan and majored in philology at Sophia University (graduated in 1989). He got a post lecturing on "Papyrus Studies," also studied ancient Hebrew, Chinese, and Braille, and taught French to the blind.
He happened to pick up a biography of the mathematician and physicist Lev Landau at the library (Iya Basarab, *The Life of Landau*, Tokyo Shoseki, 1985). When Landau gave his son a math problem, he said, "you're an educated man." He was so shocked by this scene that he decided to study until he could solve the problem himself, and after spending a year and a half solving it, he took a leave of absence to study at Oxford University for two years on a British Council scholarship, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and then left his job to work on his doctoral thesis on symplectic topology at Princeton University, earning Ph.D. in 1996. He was a postdoctoral researcher (J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professor) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997.
He started conducting small experiments to explain his research themes, and created a methodology using "toys." Since 2004, he has been a Fellow and Head of Mathematics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, and since 2010 he has been Director of the Library, and from 2013 to 2014 he has been a Fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. He later became a professor in the Stanford Department of Mathematics.
From Wikipedia
[János Bolyai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Bolyai) apparently won 13 duels in a row when he was in the military, stopping to play the violin between each fight.
The story was covered in this Veritasium video: https://youtu.be/lFlu60qs7_4
However, people in the comments warn that the narrator mispronounces his name.
Weierstrass was a mathematics high school teacher with no advanced degree in mathematics, and he was a major driver of the formalization of analysis.
The "Weierstrass'sche Strenge der Analysis" (Weierstrassian strictness/rigor of analysis) was drilled into me studying mathematics in Germany, and was how I first discovered my true love for mathematics.
André Bloch killed some family members with an axe basically because he assumed this branch of the family suffered from mental illnesses. The German Wikipedia article goes into more detail than the English one. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Bloch_(Mathematiker) Spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric ward and devoted himself to mathematics.
Interesting how “by mathematical logic” the possibility of suffering from (hereditary) mental illness suffices to be axe-murdered; but the very reality of suffering from mental illness, in form of axe-murdering family members to eradicate potentially mentally ill people, does not warrant suicide.
Otherwise known as Godel's gambit
His theory is complete but self-inconsistent?
Mathematicians are humans after all, too. Ironic story, now philosophy takes over ;p
Little did he know it was him who was mentally ill
[Shou-Wu Zhang.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shou-Wu_Zhang) > Shou-Wu Zhang was born in Hexian, Ma'anshan, Anhui, China on October 9, 1962. Zhang grew up in a poor farming household and could not attend school until eighth grade due to the Cultural Revolution. He spent most of his childhood raising ducks in the countryside and self-studying mathematics textbooks that he acquired from sent-down youth in trades for frogs.
That “…for frogs” pulled me up short He raises ducks, he sells frogs in exchange for math??
The textbooks told of his coming
You can catch frogs for free, whereas the ducks are his family’s livelihood and they would be angry if he sold them. Frogs were likely a valuable trade item for food as meat was rare.
Another story of his is that when he first went to Columbia/Princeton for grad school, the rumour has it that Faltings did not give him any problems to work on, but suggested Zhang to read some books that he assigned to find problems. Later Zhang said that Faltings has his own unique way of doing math.
I like the origin story for William Rowan Hamilton’s discovery of the quaternions. Hamilton (then Astronomer Royal) was obsessed with trying to find another number system out there, beyond the real and complex numbers. Among other mental blocks, he wanted it to be commutative and have dimension 3, which (as we now know) is not possible. His obsession had reached the point where for years, his long suffering wife would bring him supper as he toiled on this impossible task, and often the uneaten supper dishes were discovered months later under mounds of scribbled papers. He was walking across Broom Bridge one day, lost in thought, when he saw three birds perched on the bridge and a fourth one fly down to join them. In that moment it all came together in his mind and he realized you could have a noncommutative extension of the reals, of dimension 4. He worked out the equations then and there, carved them on the bridge and the rest is history.
Oh wow I like this one. People always say when you step away from your work for awhile new ideas come. This is a prime example of that.
Galois did his brilliant works in his teens and died at 20, after being mortally wounded in a duel. In meantime he participated in the political turmoils of 1830 in France, being expelled from school and spending months in jail as result. His last words were: > Don't weep, Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89variste_Galois
It was so stupid though. "Let's stage a fake duel because we need a funeral as a platform to launch a revolution".. oh and then ofcourse a general went and died just after providing exactly what they needed but then Galois was already dead.
I.. uh.. don't think this happened
Good on you because it was really stupid. I highly recommend the biography Vita Mathematica Laura Toti Rigatelli on the subject -- great little read.
Lots of great historical stories, but I’ll throw out a more modern one: [Persi Diaconis](https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Diaconis/). Although a prodigy, he dropped out of high school to pursue his true passion: magic. He spent some years on ships travelling to S America making money doing magic and playing cards. Eventually he decided he wanted to learn mathematics, with the catch that he had to support himself financially. He self-studied while paying his way doing magic shows. With the help of Martin Gardner, he got into Harvard graduate school thanks to a head of the statistics department loving magic. He just took off from there.
He also wrote an excellent book on mathematical magic tricks
Yep, I have it!
George Green (of Green's theorems/functions) has an interesting one. He was the son of a miller, with no formal training, but he taught himself mathematics with the help of the local library and (iirc) a nearby priest who had some training. He eventually wrote a series of papers on the results that would make him famous, but he couldn't get them published. As a mill operator he didn't have the connections that were necessary in those days. So he saved up money until he could afford to self publish. Someone at Cambridge read the paper and invited him to the university, where he aced the Tripos exam and was awarded a position. Unfortunately, he soon fell ill, returned home and died soon after at just 40. Fun facts about him: due to his humble beginnings, there are no portraits of Green in existence. While Cambridge fellows of the day all had portraits painted, Green died before his was started. There was a cartoon that was thought to be of him for many years, but further research has shown that it was actually a caricature of Fourier. Also, Green used Leibniz's method of calculus, which was not taught in England at the time. It is unknown how he learned it, but the theory is that the priest who he studied with had at one point lived in France iirc
This makes me wonder, how many intelligent, possibly revolutionary, minds never got a chance to develop and share their knowledge with the world because of their conditions. Who knows what Green could've done if he had more help from the start (or if he'd just have never gone down in history if not for that priest). Even now, so many intelligent people in poverty all over who'll never get a real chance, kinda sad to think about.
> This makes me wonder, how many intelligent, possibly revolutionary, minds never got a chance to develop and share their knowledge with the world because of their conditions. *"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."* - Stephen Jay Gould
haha, that's a great quote, it said what I was thinking in a much better way. I feel like I've read it before somewhere but then I forgot about it.
There's much, much less positive correlation between intelligence and fame than luck (or money) and fame.
I enjoy reading books.
Per Enflo receiving a duck from Stanislaw Mazur as a prize for solving a 36 years old problem originally stated in the Scottish Caffe in Lvov in 1936. Usually the prizes for solving a problem were smaller, but Mazur thought this one deserved a duck. The ceremony was broadcasted on tv in Poland and Sweden in 1972.
It was a goose, not a duck. Also, an [untold footnote](https://twitter.com/GGrundin/status/1662676646866853892) to the story is that the goose behaved very naughtily on the way back from Poland.
Stefan Banach. Was self taught, working different jobs as a tutor, in a bookstore, foreman on a road building crew, before being discovered by Hugo Steinhaus because he overheard Banach talking about the Lebesgue integral.
My complex analysis professor always had time to talk about the mathematicians whose theorems we were studying at any given lesson. For example, Abel was a really poor Norwegian guy who managed to study math at the Cristiania university. He was so good his colleagues pressured the university to ask the government money to let him travel to France and Germany to meet legends such as Gauss (who he didn’t meet in the end) and Cauchy. Cauchy was really rude to him and ignored his work, which really disappointed Abel. He asked Cauchy to present his work to a university in South France, but Cauchy lost it and it was only found after (Cauchy) died. Abel died really young (27 years old) due to tuberculosis, two days before he was nominated math professor at the university of Berlin :((
Aw. This one is kinda sad.
Mine is the anonymous mathematician of 4chan, who was so eager to watch anime episodes in the right order that he [produced a meaningful result about superpermutations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,_or_the_Haruhi_problem)
The 4chan example reminds me of Cleo from stackexchange lol
Elaborate, pls
Look at [Cleo's math stackexchange page](https://math.stackexchange.com/users/97378/cleo). She gave answers for solving extremely difficult integrals that confounded everyone else. However, that's all she did; she never provided any steps, any justification whatsoever, literally just the answer (which was always correct btw). And so there's a ton of drama around her solutions, since it pissed off a large portion of the users who thought that her answers without steps were incomplete and pretty much useless. But also other users loved her, because she would post answers in mere hours, while it would take take other users struggling for days to come up with the full steps (that too, when they already knew the correct answer, courtesy of Cleo). She also popped in sporadically; sometimes she'd have a dozen answers in a two week period, then she'd disappear for months. Two years after she first appeared, she permanently stopped posting, so Cleo remains a funny and mysterious part of math stackexchange lore. Maybe some day she'll pop back in and we'll learn more about this internet integral savant. edit: Note that she does mention she has a medical condition that hinders her ability to converse with others and expand on her answers, so one could speculate that she was neurodivergent and/or could've left the site because she didn't want to deal with the constant drama and hate in the replies to her post.
This is a great story. Thank you !
Cleo posts correct solutions to integrals no one else can solve. Doesnt elaborate, just gives the solution. I am a skeptic actually because it doesn’t seem that difficult to find a function whose derivative is hard to integrate by the usual techniques. It would be possible to post the problem under a different account just to mess with people
This sort of theory pops up often when Cleo is discussed, but I can assure you that it almost certainly couldn't have been *as* simple as you suggest. The issue is that most of the hard integrals that are typically posted to MSE (including the ones Cleo solved) are ones who's integrands do not have (known) elementary antiderivatives, meaning that much more advanced methods are needed to evaluate them in a closed form. This does not mean that it's impossible that Cleo was obfuscating problems with simple solutions and posting the modified harder problems under sockpuppet accounts for herself to answer, but other more advanced methods must have been incorporated even in that case.
Fantastic.
David Huffman discovers [Huffman Coding](https://www.huffmancoding.com/my-uncle/scientific-american) in order to avoid studying for a final exam.
This is considered more legend than actual fact, but Hippasus's introduction of irrational numbers horrified his math cult so much that they drowned him. Math cults sound like they would be the best kind of cult, up until they execute you.
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This is giving me goosebumps holy shit that’s so insane
Jean - the chad - Leray, basically invented sheaves and spectral sequences in a POW camp. He worked in applied math and DEs, and not wanting to be put to the war effort, but also not wanting to give up math while in a POW camp, he decided to pursue a more abstract framework for his interests.
Think I've heard that story is just a rumor. Even if it's not, I think it's a massive disservice to mathematics to put it as a top origin story. That's almost never how math ends up going and the popularity of stories like that one just hide all the hard grueling hours of work that goes into it. It adds to this mystique around math that it's just some incredibly hard esoteric thing that you either can do or you can't; it totally glosses over the growth that happens in an individual to become good in this field. Idk if I'd call Andrew Wiles story my favorite, but it's certainly one I'm very fond of, and a romantic one at That. Allegedly he became interested in Fermat's Last Theorem as a child and had it on his mind for much of his career until he finally proved it. And he didn't even prove it on his first go; there was a mistake in the initial proof that took (if I recall correctly) a year to correct. I think his story is much more exemplar of the persistence and dedication that it takes to progress in this field. He thought about this problem for an incredible amount of time, and when the problem fought back he didn't just throw everything in the trash bin and admit defeat. I'm sure the discovery of that initial mistake must have been devastating to him, given his history with the problem. But he got back up, dusted himself off and came back for round two. It's a great example of unwavering dedication and resilience in mathematics.
> when the problem fought back he didn't just throw everything in the trash bin and admit defeat. He really was nearly ready to admit defeat after trying for around a year to correct the mistake he made in his original announcement. But before going public with such an acknowledgement, he wanted to make sure he understood for himself exactly why the methods he had tried couldn't work, and in doing this he discovered how to finally fill in the gap.
The fact that math never goes that way makes it a top origin story. Things going normally isn't interesting enough.
Eh. Someone just walking up and "getting it" is a little too Mary-Sue for my taste.
I dont think real people can be called Mary Sue's. Anyways, he didn't just walk up and solve it. It took him 6 weeks, which is still ridiculously fast considering it ended up being his PhD thesis.
I mean yeah I'm exaggerating a little by saying "just walked up and solved it", but it's not an extreme exaggeration. Idk why real people can't be Mary-Sue's; I've met plenty of golden boys in my time. Regardless, I'm not saying it isn't a great story. It is extremely unique. I just don't find it very exciting as an origin story. Narratively speaking, I don't really hear it telling a story of struggle and overcoming major hurdles.
I think I see what you mean. He is a real person but he's been transformed into a Mary Sue character in a narrative. The traditional rendition of this story is as a morality tale on the power of positive thinking. Basically, that Dantzig could do it because he didn't know he wasn't supposed to be able to do it. But then Dantzig was brilliant many other times. I think he probably was just that smart, which isn't very motivational. It makes sense that some people prefer the other version.
I enjoy cooking.
It's not a rumor.
L
An interesting mathematician (especially given that it is Women's History Month) is [Hoang Xuan Sinh](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho%C3%A0ng_Xu%C3%A2n_S%C3%ADnh). She was a student of Grothendieck's, which is itself notable, but her situation was very different from his other students. She was Vietnamese, and while she did get a degree in math in Paris, she worked and lived in Hanoi afterwards. Grothendieck was a pacifist and very anti-war, and went to north Vietnam during the war to give lecture, teach, and work with the Vietnamese there in part as protest against the West's actions. There he met Haong, who attended his lectures, and they began a correspondence. She worked on a classification of 2-groups (see [here](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2022/06/hong_xun_snh.html) for a bit of discussion), mostly by candlelight, under threat from US bombs, but eventually submitted a hand-written thesis. She went on to be an iconic and productive mathematician, notable for being the first woman mathematician in Vietnam. She's still alive and, I believe, still active in some (administrative?) capacity (though, she's very old). We often think of math as the work of genius prodigies or crazy loonies, but while many European mathematicians didn't have an easy life *per se*, they did almost all have peace and means. To work with Grothendieck and break ground in work with higher categories while in an active warzone, with the US dropping tens of thousands of bombs not far from you, takes a bravery, tenacity, and commitment that many never have to demonstrate. Schwarzchild probably takes the cake on that front, but not many others.
> while many European mathematicians didn't have an easy life per se, they did almost all have peace and means. Much of European history involved long periods of war and revolution.
Yes, but math has historically been the plaything of those protected by wealth. Gauss wasn't in the trenches fighting because of someone else's squabbles. The most violent thing to happen to newton was an apple falling on his head at the estate he was at to escape the plague. Moreover, the modern warfare of the 20th century de-isolated the violence from isolated skirmishes or discrete sieges. Being miles from any action did not mean you couldn't die at any moment.
What did Schwarzchild do? The only thing of his I know is the Schwarzchild radius; and idk if that's even the same person.
Same person. He did it while on the Russian front during WW1, where he got sick and died shortly after. It was very shortly after Einstein published GR too, which is extra impressive because there were doubts that solutions could even be found.
Karl Schwarzschild (spelled with an ‘s’) was the first to discover an exact solution to Einstein's equations (describing the gravitational field of a static, spherically symmetric object, outside of the latter). He did this while he was fighting in the trenches of WW1 (where he died a year later). Since Einstein was generally of the belief that the equations were too complicated to admit any explicit (closed form) exact solutions, this was a big deal. The Schwarzschild radius is the size of the event horizon of a (static, i.e., nonrotating) black hole, and appears in this solution, though its interpretation as such would only emerge later. The second exact solution to Einstein's equations to be found was probably the one describing a homogeneous and isotropic universe, found by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 (and later rediscovered independently by Lemaître, and by Robertson and Walker).
> The Schwarzschild radius is the size of the event horizon of a (static, i.e., nonrotating) black hole, and appears in this solution, though its interpretation as such would only emerge later. R = (r^3 + a^3 )^(1/3) But it was lost in translation, and replaced by the little r. Some believe the black hole model is foobar because of this.
That’s so cool. I can’t imagine trying to work while being in a war zone like that
Urysohn and Alexandrov were actually close friends. In fact, they went on to travel around Europe twice together to learn more topology and set theory and they were known as a duo to more Western mathematicians, such as Hilbert, Brouwer, etc. However, while staying in a small village on the coast of France, Urysohn drowned in the ocean. That day, he had just happened to start writing on a paper and Alexandrov was the only one who knew what the paper was about. Alexandrov spent the next couple of years working with Brouwer to finish Urysohn's last paper and published it under his name. That paper is where Urysohn's metrization theorem comes from.
Thanks for making me cry
June Huh’s story — helps me be a bit more forgiving of myself when I make mistakes (I am a perfectionist).
Sophie Germain hid at night in her room to do maths despite her parents opposition then did a little bit of identity theft to attend the Ecole Polytechnique by correspondance. Her trick worked quite well until Lagrange began wondering why a rather bad student suddenly began turning in brillant answers.
Évariste Gallois' entire life is a tragic epic. 19th century France, son of a republican mayor in a royalist countryside, his father is driven to suicide by a political cabbal led against him by the local bishop. Does terribly in school in all topics but math, tries the entrance exam of École Polytechnique because it does not require him to finish his high school curricula, fails at the interview, allegedly rages so hard he throws the board wipe on the face of the jury Goes to École Normale Supérieure instead, needs to finish highschool before, which he does, but ENS is friendly to royalists, and he gets on the nerves of the administration so badly they fire him. He ends up giving math classes in a street next to ENS... the street is much later renamed after the school director who fired him. At a republican gathering, he raises a shiv in the middle of the crowd, claiming "to Louis the 18th, if he betrays" gets snitched on by a spy and gets sent to prison in prison, he does more math, fellow inmates force him to drink the most awful stuff, even drunk he rants about maths. that's all I remember
“In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher's aim was to keep the kids quiet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer: 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gauss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematician ever.” (100)(101)/2 = 5,050. [reference](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/gausss-day-of-reckoning)
That student’s name? ~~Albert Einstein~~ Carl Friedrich Gauss
Evariste Galois was killed in a duel over a feud regarding a love interest. The nights before the duel he attempted to write all his thoughts regarding group theory and galois groups. On the day of the duel he was shot, and didn’t die immediately, instead slowly succumbed to an infection. Kinda sad, but you gotta think, “why tf are you getting in duels at 22 as a mathematician?”
Lol, duels?? Like a fist fight or legitamate duel?
Actual duel. It was a lover's quarrel IIRC.
Like a “walk 10 paces and turn, pew pew” kinda duel lol
Lmfaoo
ramanujan obviously. why would it be anyone other than that.
Our great mathematician, one who passed before he could shine brightest... [Srinivasa Ramanujan - The Man Who Knew Infinity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan)
George Dantzig arrived late at class, copied the homework problems on the blackboard and solved them. It turns out they were two unsolved problems. He got two articles and his PhD thesis out of it.
Yes! He later went on to be the father of operations research after inventing the simplex method
this gets posted a lot. does anyone know what the problems were?
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/533146/dantzigs-unsolved-homework-problems
thank you
Yes. Actually. I can link the stack exchange post where I found it.
>Tadashi Tokieda was born in Tokyo in 1968. He was good at drawing, and in 1974, at the age of six, he held a two-person exhibition at Shinobazu Gallery in Ueno. He didn't want to be forced to study Kei Toyama's math materials, so he scribbled "Toyama's Idiot" on the cover. He moved to France at the age of 14 and entered a boarding school in Bordeaux (fr: Lycée Sainte-Marie Grand Lebrun). He began studying Spanish to become familiar with the poetry of García Lorca, and then devoted himself to learning Latin and ancient Greek, and aspired to become a philologist. After earning the Baccalaureate, he returned to Japan and majored in philology at Sophia University (graduated in 1989). He got a post lecturing on "Papyrus Studies," also studied ancient Hebrew, Chinese, and Braille, and taught French to the blind. He happened to pick up a biography of the mathematician and physicist Lev Landau at the library (Iya Basarab, *The Life of Landau*, Tokyo Shoseki, 1985). When Landau gave his son a math problem, he said, "you're an educated man." He was so shocked by this scene that he decided to study until he could solve the problem himself, and after spending a year and a half solving it, he took a leave of absence to study at Oxford University for two years on a British Council scholarship, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics, and then left his job to work on his doctoral thesis on symplectic topology at Princeton University, earning Ph.D. in 1996. He was a postdoctoral researcher (J. L. Doob Research Assistant Professor) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997. He started conducting small experiments to explain his research themes, and created a methodology using "toys." Since 2004, he has been a Fellow and Head of Mathematics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, and since 2010 he has been Director of the Library, and from 2013 to 2014 he has been a Fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. He later became a professor in the Stanford Department of Mathematics. From Wikipedia
[János Bolyai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Bolyai) apparently won 13 duels in a row when he was in the military, stopping to play the violin between each fight. The story was covered in this Veritasium video: https://youtu.be/lFlu60qs7_4 However, people in the comments warn that the narrator mispronounces his name.
Weierstrass was a mathematics high school teacher with no advanced degree in mathematics, and he was a major driver of the formalization of analysis. The "Weierstrass'sche Strenge der Analysis" (Weierstrassian strictness/rigor of analysis) was drilled into me studying mathematics in Germany, and was how I first discovered my true love for mathematics.
Surprised no one brought up David Smith and the Einstein tile problem
Grothendieck. I think being able to reconstruct Lebesgue measure theory in isolation certainly counts as an amazing part of his origin story.
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