The Jewish community has brought many brilliant mathematicians to the world. Their contribution to mathematics is enormous throughout the ages, listing incredibly talented individuals such as Felix Hausdorff, Jacques Hadamard, and John von Neumann. Emmy Noether, a woman of Jewish descent is currently considered to be the greatest woman in the world of math.
Knowing all this, let’s take a look at the greatest names of Jewish mathematicians and their contributions to the field.
John Von Neumann
John von Neumann died relatively young – at the age of 53, but not before, he contributed greatly to mathematics. Even as a child, Neumann was a prodigy. Once he received his PhD in Math and a degree in Chemical Engineering, he started teaching students in Princeton University. Until the day he died, Neumann was working in education.
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People spoke of him as a magnificent teacher. Even today, young minds are motivated to study mathematics by the discoveries of and stories about John Von Neumann. If you are a student who struggles with understanding some concepts of math, you can request math help free. Plainmath offers students free math help to allow them to fulfil their potential and who knows, maybe even bring a new contribution to this industry. In the past, studying math was harder considering that students did not have access to such assistance. You would have to go to the source, Professor Neumann to get basic answers to some mathematics questions. No matter how great that sounds right now, it is not an option. In fact, most professors at school are too busy to help every student individually. Thankfully, there are sources that can help turn you into a magnificent mathematician. At the least, these sources will help you get a high grade.
Neumann’s contributions are widespread to the fields of Quantum Mechanics (his Dirac-von Neumann axioms), Computing (the Von Neumann architecture or stored-program technique), Game Theory (for which he was the founder), etc.
Emmy Noether
As we previously mentioned, Noether is the most important female mathematician in history even today. She graduated from a Hohere Tochter Schule in Erlanger before she continued her math education at the University of Erlangen. Faced with a lot of female discrimination at the time, she had to transfer to the University of Gottingen in 1903. But, when the restrictions against female enrolment in Doctorate program were repealed, she returned to Erlangen where she got her Doctorate Degree.
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For many years after this, she worked for free conducting research studies with great minds like Hilbert and Klein. Because of gender bias, she was never promoted to professor despite her amazing contributions.
Noether was a German scholar with landmark contributions to two different fields – theoretical physics and abstract algebra. Even then, she was considered to be one of the leading mathematicians.
Noether developed many popular theories, the three most prominent being the theory of rings, algebras, and fields. In the world of Physics, her theorem explained the connection between conservation laws and symmetry laws.
Noether was awarded the Ackermann-Teubner Memorial Prize in Mathematics in 1932.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was partly Jewish and while he is mostly known for his contributions to Physics, he was also a magnificent mathematician. He contributed some equations to geometry and calculus. Ten of these equations are known as the Einstein Field Equations. They were initially published back in 1915 and studied by many math experts in the following years, including Noether. One of these popular equations demonstrates how the curvature of space-time is inflicted by stress-energy.
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Furstenberg and Margulis
Two already retired Jewish professors called Margulis and Furstenberg won an award of around $700,000 at the age of 84 and 74. This award is an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the world of mathematics and is called the Abel Prize. These two experts are known for their amazing work in dynamics and probability.
Furstenberg earned his doctorate at Princeton and worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1965 to 2003 when he retired. Margulis got his doctorate from Moscow State University and also won a prestigious Fields Medal for achievements in Mathematics at 32 years old. In 1991, he took a position as a professor at Yale.
Other Popular Mathematicians
Thanks to the magnificent minds of all many Jewish mathematicians, the world has witnessed major contributions to different branches of mathematics. The most prominent names include:
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George Cantor and Felix Hausdorff in set theory
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Guide Castelnuovo, Andre Weil, and Frederigo Enriques in modern algebraic geometry
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Giulio Ascoli, Vito Volterra, and Norbert Wiener in functional analysis
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Israel Gefland, I.E. Segal, and Mark Naimark in theory of operator algebras
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Albert Einstein, Norbert Wiener, and Joseph Doob in stochastic process theory
These people’s contributions have changed the world of math forever.
Author’s Bio:
Vendy Adams is a math instructor at a college in the US. She obtained her Master’s degree two years before she took this position, after which she taught in high school. Today, Adams is pursuing her Doctorate degree and shaping young minds at the same time.
