Wonderful Minds

Wonderful Minds The Mathematicians Who Changed the World Ian Stewart Which mathematician worked out a crucial concept the night before dying in a duel? Who financed his Maths and Medicine career through gambling and chess? Who learnt maths from his wallpaper? Ian Stewart presents the extraordinary lives and astounding discoveries of twenty-five of history’s greatest mathematicians, from Archimedes and Liu Hui to Benoit Mandelbrot and William Thurston. His subjects are inspiring people who have made crucial contributions to Mathematics. Includes the stories of rediscovered genuises Srinivasa Ramanujan and Emmy Noether, alongside the towering figures of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (inventor of the algorithm), Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Bernhard Reimann (precursor to Einstein), Henri Poincaré, Ada Lovelace (possibly the first computer programmer), Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Ian Stewart’s vivid accounts are fascinating in themselves and, taken together, they join into a gripping story of key steps in the development of Mathematics. Mathematics with the biographies of illustrious people.