I've read the same thing.

Archimedes brought us nearly to calculus, summations of infinitesmals.

Newton developed calculus itself (although it was at one time purported that he might have gotten more from earlier, greek work than was earlier suspected, I'm not sure whether those claims went anywhere). Did Newton or Leibnitz either one actually develop the fundamental theorems of calculus?

Gauss developed probability, formulated the bell curve, and established non-euclidean geometry. I like him because of his early history - he came from semi-literate, working parents. There's a perhaps apocryphal story about his illiterate (?) mother asking one of his schoolmates whether Karl was really so good at math, to which the friend replied that he was the best mathematician in Germany. I also like him because of his comments on Kant ("Everything Kant says is either trivial or false."). I think I read somewhere that he did not publish his findings on non-euclidean geometry for years after he wrote them down, because Kant had supposedly proven that Euclidean geometry was the only possible geometry. I don't know if this is true or not, though. He was known for hording his knoweldge and honing it until it was perfect for publication ("few but ripe," wonder what that is in German ... wenige aber reif?).


I guess I get some of this from Keiva's source, and maybe some from others. (Always possible I misremembered stuff, too.)


The reason behind choosing these guys is that if you asked professional mathematicians to name their top 10, these three names would be on everyone's list. (That was the justification given in some source I read.)


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