MacTutor

Mathematicians Of The Day

4th April

Born:

• 1782: Vincenzo Flauti
• 1790: Jean-Baptiste Bélanger (poster)
• 1809: Benjamin Peirce (poster)
• 1842: Édouard Lucas (poster)
• 1863: Jean-Marie Le Roux
• 1868: Philippa Fawcett (poster)
• 1884: Thomas MacRobert (poster)
• 1902: Eberhard Hopf (poster)
• 1939: Mary Lee Wheat Gray (poster)
• 1949: Shing-Tung Yau (poster)

Died:

• 1617: John Napier (poster)
• 1807: Jérôme Lalande (poster)
• 1923: John Venn (poster)
• 1925: Walter Rouse Ball (poster)
• 1949: William Threlfall (poster)
• 1961: Simion Stoilow (poster)
• 1981: Carl Siegel (poster)
• 1991: Hans Reichardt (poster)
• 2012: Nikolai Nikolaevich Krasovskii

Quotation of the day

From Benjamin Peirce

[after proving Euler's formula e^{π i} = -1 in a lecture]
Gentlemen, that is surely true, it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means. But we have proved it, and therefore we know it is the truth.