10 Mathematicians to help make learning FUN!

Hey parents! Are you having a hard time getting your kid interested in mathematics?  Here's a list of interesting Mathematicians to keep your kid saying "Arthritic? More like Awesome-mitic!"

 

1. Karl Marx - Whoa there, coming out the gate a little hot here, aren't we? Well, there's mathematics in everything and boy did he ever find them them in his analysis of the working class struggle, Das Kapital. Of course, some of his calculations were made using geometery, which was slowly falling out of fashion by that point. Make learning fun, exciting and alive while you learn about the class struggle and how war is finically inevitable!
   
2. Sophia Kovalevskya -Did someone say Grrrrrl pwr!? Sophia didn't need no man in order to become the first female professor of mathematics in Euorpe, even if it was Russia. Married on paper to the 26 year old Vladimir Kovalevsky when she was 18, they never fucked until they were in their 30's. This allowed Sophia to leave Russia (at a time when women couldn't get a mathematical education and couldn't travel without a male family member to escort you) to get a mathematical education in another country. It also allowed Vladimir to translate the works of Darwin into Russian before Darwin even finished them!
   
3. Galoe. Gal-law? Gal-o-iss? How do you say Évariste Galois? The dude everyone knows, and the one that reminds the world that we are in fact, crazy rockstars that live fast and die young. An old mathematician produces no work, so this punk went out on top in a gunfight. He was looked down upon, because he was a son of a politician during the french revolutionary war. But Gal-law he was like, no I'm a mathematician, I don't want to politics, I want to math. Like the chivalrous, gentleman he was, he got into a pistol dual over the honor of a maiden which he tragically died from. Not until after he released his brilliant ideas into the world, which old people never got, just Jimi Hendricks "Electric Ladyland". Why hasn't there been a movie made about this gorgeous young white french dude, but instead mathematicians get Russell Crowe just getting older and fatter?
4.  Godel. Simple. This one ryhmes with Yodel. He was Einstien's pal. Well, actually, Einstien looked up to him, because Einstien only proved relativity, but Godel proved that 1 + 1 = 2.
5. Stephen Smale - Good, finally an American in here. Stood on the steps of the Kremilin in the 60's and told both the Americans and Ruskies to fuck off!! USA! USA! USA! Also had a major breakthru in the field of topology which proved that Poincare conjecture is true in dimensions with more than 3 dimensions.  
6. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi - If you remember that he's not a Muslim mathematician, but a PERSIAN mathematician, then you can begin to understand why a man named Muhammad can invent algebra and get the word Algorithm named after him. While little is know about his life, his works have been kept and were the stepping stone from algebraic like thinking during the Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, and Roman periods to algebra as tool for calculation. Mathematicians don't become legends and gods of the field because people remember the gossip of the day, they live on through the works they create. No one remembers or talks about how Euclid wrote the elements, people barely remember Euler outside of math circles, and Fermat is remember for dying and leaving behind an unsolvable puzzle that has since been solved. Death comes to us all, (Muslim, Christian, Buddhist) and time will make fools of any legacy we leave.
   
7. Leonardo DaVinci - Conspiracy time, kids! Why does this man who hung out with scientists and mathematicians seem to have so much engineering thrown into his work? Who knows! Aliens, a group devoted to the child of Christ, maybe, IDK, fucking lizard people!? The fact that he illustrated a book on a divine proportion and seems really good getting precision and proportion right in his work shows how he was influenced by outside forces.
   
8. Leonardo Fibonacci - It's the number. The important one. God's number. It shows up in everything, from plants to whole financial systems. It's phi, and even Euclid knew about, so it must be important. And Fibonacci mentions the series of numbers as a fun problem about rabbits to teach people how to use the new fangled "Arabic Numbers". That's what he wants you to think though! He was one in the line of people that keeps the secrets of the mathematics that holds together time and space, started by Pythagoras himself it has been passed on. Fibonacci was a failure and released that number as an innocent problem about rabbits. The rest has been kept secret.
   
9. Lewis Carole - Yes, he was a mathematician. And a weirdo. Maybe a pedophile? Someone thought he was Jack the Ripper, too. Oh! And he wrote a famous drug trip that became a Disney film! The man famous for disappearing cats and world's that make no sense, actually was really obsessed about logic. Did a book on linear logic. Also did some  mathematical work involving fair voting systems. But he also maybe hated "new" abstract mathematics, wanting to keep "real" numbers and geometry.
   
10. Gregori Peleman - The youngest on our list, he proved the poincare conjecture in 3 diminsions. He also just wants to be left alone, and  lives with his mother in St. Petersburg Russia where he publishes no math.