If there is one subject that is the most impressive in the reading period, it should be mathematics. After all, this subject is always jokingly called "looking down and picking up the pen on the ground and never understood it again", for most ordinary people, mathematics is really "too difficult".
To this day, there are countless college students who say that they are tortured by high numbers and feel that no matter how long they study in front of mathematics, they are "five scum".
Obsessed with mathematics, Archimedes and Newton
In the long history of human civilization, there have been countless geniuses, and the greatest four mathematicians are probably Archimedes, Newton, Euler and Gauss. First of all, let's take a look at what Archimedes and Newton, who are addicted to mathematics, are like, and what crazy things they did in the face of mathematics.
Archimedes is probably the oldest of the mathematicians. He was born in 287 BC and was an ancient Greek. Many people have probably heard his famous quote "Give me a fulcrum, I can pry up the whole earth". Archimedes identified the basic principles of statics and hydrostatics, as well as the buoyancy theorem, the lever principle, and so on.
Archimedes showed extraordinary mathematical talent from an early age, and when he went to school, he studied with Euclid, the father of geometry, and put what he had learned all his life into practice, creating many weapons against enemies to help the country win wars. Therefore, many people say that the war at that time was actually a war between the Roman army and Archimedes alone, after all, the weapons he made were very complex and extremely difficult to find flaws in the eyes of the Romans.
So how crazy was Archimedes in the face of mathematics? This begins with multiple versions of the story before his death, three of which are related to mathematics. For example, in the face of the intrusion of Roman soldiers, Archimedes continued to draw a geometric figure and derive a formula without looking up, begging the soldier to wait for him to come up with the formula before killing himself.
Either version shows how much Archimedes loved mathematics. Even in the face of death, his energy will not be divided. It can be said that when he is immersed in the ocean of mathematics, the threat of death cannot make him stop thinking.
Although Newton was not like Archimedes, who was still concerned about mathematics before his death, from the relevant introduction in "The Great Mathematician", Newton did miss his love because he was addicted to mathematics. What is even more tragic is that this loss of love has made him spend his life in loneliness.
Many people only know that Newton is the father of modern mechanics, but they do not know that Newton's achievements in the field of mathematics are also very high. Many modern historians believe that both Newton and Leibniz developed "calculus" with their own abilities. Arguably, the founding of calculus is Newton's most famous mathematical achievement, and he has also published papers related to mathematics and even published his own algebraic lecture notes.
And Newton's madness is that when he indulges in mathematics, he can put other things aside, even if it is a very rare love for us ordinary people. Or in Newton's mind, mathematics was far more meaningful than love.
Highly productive Euler
Euler' full name was Leonhard Euler, and he was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1707. Euler is special in that he is the most prolific mathematician in history, why? After all, judging from Euler's extant writings and related papers, he produced an average of more than eight hundred pages per year, a figure that many people could not write in their lifetime.
Euler really loves mathematics, because you should know that mathematics has many sub-disciplines, such as geometry and algebra that we have studied, which actually belong to different branches of mathematics. It stands to reason that only a few of them have been studied and there have been relevant achievements, but Euler's treatises cover almost all branches of mathematics at the time. His books Principles of Differentiation and Principles of Integrals expanded the field of calculus and laid the foundation for the emergence and development of later branches of differential geometry.
Euler's invention, Sudoku
Euler is so productive because he devotes almost all of his time to mathematics. According to the character story introduction, Euler has almost no time for entertainment, and as long as he has time, he will delve into mathematics. This problem can be seen in the degree of his use of his eyes, because he was completely blind in his right eye by overwork in 1735, when he was only 28 years old.
Euler Line
In such a good year, because of the indulgence in mathematical research, one of their eyes is completely blind, and this degree of "madness" that sleeps and forgets food is basically no one can do. However, heaven did not seem to pay special attention to the hard-working mathematician, and in 1771, a serious illness caused Euler to go blind in his left eye. However, in the time before she went blind, Euler had learned to record her thoughts on the plasterboard with a pen and then dictate the methods by which the students recorded them.
The most beautiful formula in mathematics – Euler's identity
It is worth mentioning that Euler himself has a strong memory and mental arithmetic skills. This allowed him, even if he was blind, to calculate most of the results through mental arithmetic. Some people also said that Euler's mental arithmetic ability at that time could calculate calculus, and if so, then he was indeed talented.
Euler's Tomb
If you search, you will find that there are too many terms in mathematics named euler. For example, Euler's theorem, Euler's function, Euler's transformation, Euler's constant, etc., these terms are enough to see how much effort the mathematician put into the study of mathematics. According to statistics, Euler began at the age of 18 until his death, published a total of 856 papers, and wrote 31 books.
In 1909, the Swiss Natural Science Society prepared to publish Euler's complete works, Euler's treatises were collected by posterity, a total of 45 volumes, if including the collation of his manuscripts, it is expected to reach 10 volumes and 4 open books, the catalog alone has 51 pages, so that the publishing industry has been busy for 35 years.
The Prince of Mathematics – Gauss
A few years before Euler's death, another world-famous mathematician was born: John Karl Friedrich Gauss. Gauss is not only one of the world's four great mathematicians, but also affectionately known as the "Prince of Mathematics". In fact, Gauss's mathematical life began very early, and according to himself, he could already count before he learned to speak.
Gauss's family conditions were not very good, even poor, so in his father's view, learning mathematics was useless. This mathematical genius was almost forced to give up studying mathematics because of this ignorance and prejudice. Fortunately, however, his love of mathematics did not make him give up on mathematics because of setbacks.
When Gauss's father did not let him light a lamp at night to read, he would carry a radish with him, dig out the radish heart, stuff it with grease, and build a simple oil lamp by himself. Every late at night, Gauss would climb up to the attic with this oil lamp to read and study mathematics, and work very hard.
Fortunately, Heaven still took care of him, and a very rich duke found him, funded him to study mathematics, and let him go further and further down the road. After that, Gauss learned a lot of mathematical knowledge, read a large number of works by Newton and Euler, and mastered the theory of calculus.
Gauss's life was not only highly accomplished in mathematics, but importantly he was able to apply mathematics in many fields and achieved gratifying results. He drew the world's first map of the Earth's magnetic field and invented the magnetic strength needle. More importantly, Gauss relied on his knowledge of mathematics to make many reports on astronomy, and it took him only one hour to solve the comet orbital value that Euler had spent three days to calculate.
The famous American mathematician Bell once commented on Gauss in his book "The Mathematician": After Gauss's death, people knew that he had foreseen some 19th-century mathematics, and if he could leak some of what he knew, it is likely that the current mathematics would be half a century or more advanced.
Mathematics has been throughout Gauss's life, and he has also proved with his talent and effort that opportunities are always left to those who are prepared. In addition to talent, hard work is also important.
The Man Who Was Favored by the God of Mathematics "Ramanujan"
In the previous article, I introduced the world-famous mathematicians, who are extremely crazy in the face of the discipline of mathematics, and they are very persistent. And there is such a mathematician, his life is short, but very legendary, and his amazing talent in the field of mathematics has led many to call him "the man who is favored by the god of mathematics". The mathematician, named Srinivasser Ramanujan, was a mathematical genius who could come up with countless formulas based solely on "mathematical intuition."
Born in 1887 in Erode, India, Ramanujan, unlike mathematicians who had been educated in mathematics for many of his hours, had not been exposed to formal mathematics until he was ten years old. So Ramanujan started very late, but he is probably the typical representative of "God chasing and feeding", because he mastered most of the mathematical knowledge in just a few years and came up with countless formulas with his excellent computing ability.
Srinivasser Ramanujan manuscript
Hardy, the founder of the Cambridge Analytica School in the United Kingdom, said of Ramanujan, "If I measure the talent of a mathematician according to strict mathematical standards, I can only score 25 points, Hilbert 30 points, and Ramanujan score 100 points." ”
When Ramanujan was in school, he was overly obsessed with mathematics, which led to a plummet in other subjects, and eventually failed to advance to school. So from this point of view, the genius's examination road is still very bumpy. Ramanujan wrote down the formulas he had discovered over the years and sent them to Hardy, hoping that the then-famous mathematician would give him a job. Hardy did become the genius of Bole, accepted him, and later worked with him on many works in the field of mathematics.
It is worth mentioning that Ramanujan did not like arguments, so many of the formulas he obtained often did not have deduced engineering. Asked how he deduced it, he only said that it was like an intuition in the dark that led him to these formulas. The fly in the ointment is that Ramanujan died of tuberculosis at an early age, when he was only 33 years old.
One of Ramanujan's questions published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society
Because of his innate intuition, he left a rich mathematical legacy, writing countless unheard of formulas on his manuscripts. There were mathematical theorems behind these formulas, so ramanujan died, but the study of his manuscripts never stopped.
It is no exaggeration to say that after his death, this mathematical genius left the world with countless puzzles to be solved. His unproven formulas are the object of study by many modern mathematicians. Ramanujan's intuition about mathematics has led many people to think that there may really be a "god of mathematics" in this world, and it pays special attention to this mathematician.