Godfrey Harold Hardy was one of the foremost mathematicians in England during the early part of the 20th century. He was primarily a pure mathematician, specializing in branches of mathematics that study the behavior of numbers (such as nu...

The Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is renowned for his epoch-making contributions to astronomy, physics, and scientific philosophy. Galileo was born in Pisa on Feb. 15, 1564, the first child of Vincenzio Galilei, a merchant ...

Branch of applied mathematics devised to analyze certain situations in which there is an interplay between parties that may have similar, opposed, or mixed interests. Game theory was originally developed by John von Neumann and Oscar Morge...

Monge was born into a merchant family and received a typical public school education. His instinctive aptitude for mathematics and science was so strong that he was placed in charge of the physics course at the Collège de la Trinit&...

Gaussian curvature is a numerical quantity associated with an area of a surface that describes the intrinsic geometric property of that area. It is different from the curvature of a curve, for that is an extrinsic geometric property defini...

The Gelfond-Schneider theorem states that if a and b are algebraic numbers, a is not zero or one, and b is irrational then ab is a transcendental number. For example, the theorem guarantees that 22 is transcendental by applying the result ...

Einstein's theory of relativity consists of two major portions: The special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity. Special relativity deals with phenomena that become noticeable when traveling near the speed of light, a...

Geodesic curvature measures how much a curve bends or turns. For example, a straight line has geodesic curvature zero at all of its points. The absolute value of the geodesic curvature of a circle is the same for all its points too and dep...

A sequence of numbers is said to be geometric if any term after the first can be obtained by multiplying the previous number by the same constant. This constant is called the common ratio. So the sequence 1,2,4,8,16 is geometric since each...

The German mathematician Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor (1845-1918) was noted for his theory of sets and his bold analysis of the "actual" infinite, which provoked a critical examination of the foundations of mathematics and eventua...

Anglican bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) developed a unique type of idealism based on an empirically oriented attack on abstract philosophizing combined with a defense of immaterialism. Although born on March 3, 1685, at Dysert Castle i...

George Bernard Dantzig is a mathematician and the founder of linear programming, a mathematical technique that has had extensive scientific and technical applications in such areas as computer programming, logistics, and scheduling. Applic...

The career of George Pólya was distinguished by the discovery of mathematical solutions to a number of problems originating in the physical sciences. He made contributions to probability theory, number theory, the theory of function...

Gerhard Ringel is one of the world's foremost experts on combinatorics and graph theory. Ringel was born in Kollnbrunn, Austria on October 28, 1919. He received a doctorate from Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, Germany in 1951. After...

Gertrude Cox organized and directed several agencies dedicated to research and teaching in statistics. "By her missionary zeal, her organizational ability and her appreciation of the need for a practical approach to the statistical needs o...

Gilles Personne de Roberval is generally considered to be the founder of kinematic geometry (a branch of mechanics that deals with pure motion) because of his discoveries about plane curves and the method he developed for drawing the tange...

Giuseppe Peano served most of his adult life as professor of mathematics at the University of Turin. His name is probably best known today for the contributions he made to the development of symbolic logic. Indeed, many of the symbols that...

Numerical proportion considered to be an aesthetic ideal in classical design. It refers to the ratio of the base to the height of a rectangle or to the division of a line segment into two in such a way that the ratio of the shorter part to...

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher. Known as a statesman to the general public of his own times and as a mathematician to his scholarly contemporaries, he was subsequently thought of primar...

A distinguished mathematician, Grace Chisholm Young is recognized as being the first woman to officially receive a Ph.D. in any field from a German university. Working closely with her husband, mathematician William Henry Young, she produc...

While many artists are not comfortable with the more complicated work carried out by mathematicians and vice versa, mathematics has been an important part of the art of music for centuries, from the simple counting of the beats in a musica...

Little regarded in his own time, Girard Desargues developed a treatise and theorem that formed the basis for the development of projective geometry, breaking with the straight Euclidian traditions that had informed geometry since the Helle...

In modern algebra, a system consisting of a set of elements and an operation for combining the elements, which together satisfy certain axioms. These require that the group be closed under the operation (the combination of any two elements...

Fubini had a distinguished career in mathematics, making contributions to many different aspects of the field, particularly in geometry and harmonics. Many of his important theories relating to engineering were published in a text book som...