Choose a mathematician to study their life and contributions. Each track brings together individual posts with proofs, images and interactive figures.

  • Leonhard Euler: biography, mathematical language and nine discoveries.

  • René Descartes: biography, six discoveries and studies on the idea of function.

  • Carl Friedrich Gauss: biography and ten discoveries.

  • Isaac Newton: biography, seven contributions, proofs and interactive figures.

  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: biography, calculus, binary arithmetic, the calculating machine and logic.

  • Pierre de Fermat: biography, number theory, geometry, probability and optics.

  • Blaise Pascal: biography, combinatorics, probability, conics, machines and physical experiments.

  • Joseph-Louis Lagrange: biography, calculus of variations, analytical mechanics, the Lagrange points, number theory and algebra.

  • Pierre-Simon Laplace: biography, the stability of the Solar System, the nebular hypothesis, dark stars, Laplace’s equation, determinants, classical probability, the central limit theorem, the rule of succession, the Laplace transform, the speed of sound and Laplace’s demon.

  • Sophie Germain: biography, the letters to Gauss as Monsieur Le Blanc, the theorem on Fermat, the primes that bear her name and vibrating plates.

  • James (Jakob) Bernoulli: biography, probability, the law of large numbers, compound interest, Bernoulli numbers and curves.

  • Albert Einstein: biography, relativity, mass and energy, the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and gravitation.

  • Johann Bernoulli: biography, the brachistochrone, l’Hôpital’s rule, the catenary and logarithmic differentiation.

  • Euclid of Alexandria: the Elements, postulates, constructions, the greatest common divisor, infinitely many primes and parallels.

  • James Clerk Maxwell: biography, electromagnetism, light, molecular speeds and colours.

  • John Nash: biography, equilibrium, mixed strategies, bargaining, geometry and differential equations.

  • Niels Henrik Abel: biography, the fifth-degree equation, the binomial series, elliptic functions, the lemniscate and abelian groups.

  • Évariste Galois: biography, the group of an equation, the symmetries of the triangle, solving by radicals, finite fields and the impossible constructions.

  • John Napier: biography, the two progressions, the definition of logarithms, Briggs and base 10, Napier’s bones and the slide rule.

  • Alan Turing: biography, the Turing machine, the halting problem, computable numbers, the universal machine, the Enigma, Banburismus, the imitation game and morphogenesis.

  • John von Neumann: biography, ordinals, the minimax theorem, quantum mechanics, computer architecture, merge sort, the Monte Carlo method, the biased coin and self-reproducing automata.

  • William Rowan Hamilton: biography, systems of rays and conical refraction, complex numbers as couples, Hamiltonian mechanics, quaternions, rotations in space, vectors and scalars, the Cayley–Hamilton theorem and the Icosian game.

  • Maria Gaetana Agnesi: biography, the curve of Agnesi, the Instituzioni analitiche, maxima and points of inflection, the area under the curve and the number π, the inverse method of tangents, the Cauchy distribution and the chair at Bologna.

  • Archimedes of Syracuse: biography, the crown and Archimedes’s principle, the lever, the number π, the quadrature of the parabola, the sphere and the cylinder, the Method and the palimpsest, the spiral, the Sand Reckoner and the machines of Syracuse.

  • Bernhard Riemann: biography, the Riemann integral, the rearrangement theorem, Riemann surfaces, the foundations of geometry, the zeta function, counting the primes and the Riemann hypothesis.

  • Augustin-Louis Cauchy: biography, the polygonal number theorem, determinants and permutations, limits and continuity, the convergence of series, Cauchy’s inequality, the derivative and the integral, the integral in the complex plane and stress in elastic solids.