American People Famous Mathematicians from the United States

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Albert Einstein Died at 76 (1879-1955) Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. Einstein's work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He developed the general theory of relativity, one of the ...more

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Grace Hopper Died at 86 (1906-1992) Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer in 1944, and invented the first ...more

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Ted Kaczynski age 75 Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski, also known as the "Unabomber", is an American mathematician and serial murderer. He is known for his wide-ranging social critiques, which ...more

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Tom Lehrer age 90 Thomas Andrew Lehrer is an American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician. He has lectured on mathematics and musical theater. He is best known for the pithy, humorous songs he ...more

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Kurt Gödel Died at 72 (1906-1978) Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian, and later American, logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians ...more

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Donald Knuth age 80 Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. ...more

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Charles Proteus Steinmetz Died at 58 (1865-1923) Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a German-born American mathematician and electrical engineer. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric ...more

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Benoit Mandelbrot Died at 86 (1924-2010) Benoit B. Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician, noted for developing a "theory of roughness" and "self-similarity" in nature and the field of ...more

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John Forbes Nash, Jr. age 89 John Forbes Nash, Jr. is an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the factors that govern chance ...more

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Edward Witten age 66 Edward Witten is an American theoretical physicist and professor of mathematical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Witten is a researcher in string theory, ...more

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David Rittenhouse Died at 64 (1732-1796) David Rittenhouse was a renowned American astronomer, inventor, clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman and public official. Rittenhouse was a member of the American ...more

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James Harris Simons age 80 James Harris "Jim" Simons is an American mathematician, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is a code breaker and studies pattern recognition. Simons taught mathematics at Stony ...more

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John Backus Died at 83 (1924-2007) John Warner Backus was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented the first widely used high-level programming language and was the inventor of the Backus-Naur form, a ...more

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Robert Andrews Millikan Died at 85 (1868-1953) Robert A. Millikan was an American experimental physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his measurement of the elementary electronic charge and for his work on the ...more

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Hilary Putnam age 91 Hilary Whitehall Putnam is an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, ...more

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Benjamin Banneker Died at 75 (1731-1806) Benjamin Banneker was a free African American scientist, surveyor, almanac author and farmer. Born in Baltimore County, Maryland, to a free African American woman and a former slave, Banneker ...more

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Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Died at 85 (1910-1995) Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS, was an Indian American astrophysicist born in Lahore, Punjab. Chandrasekhar was awarded, along with William A. Fowler, the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics, with ...more

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Francis Robbins Upton Died at 69 (1852-1921) Francis Robbins Upton was an American physicist and mathematician.

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Claude Shannon Died at 85 (1916-2001) Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electronic engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory". Shannon is famous for having founded ...more

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John von Neumann Died at 54 (1903-1957) John von Neumann was a Hungarian and later American pure and applied mathematician, physicist, inventor, polymath, and polyglot. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including ...more

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Solomon Feferman age 89 Solomon Feferman is an American philosopher and mathematician with works in mathematical logic. He was born in New York City, New York, and received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the University of ...more

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Marjorie Lee Browne Died at 65 (1914-1979) Marjorie Lee Browne was a noted mathematics educator. She was one of the first African-American women to receive a doctorate in mathematics.

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Steve Baer age 80 Steve Baer is an American inventor and solar and residential designer. Baer has served on the board of directors of the U.S. Section of the International Solar Energy Society, and on the board ...more

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Stephen Wolfram age 58 Stephen Wolfram is a British computer scientist, entrepreneur and former physicist known for his contributions to theoretical physics; his pioneering work on knowledge-based programming; as the ...more

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Martin Gardner Died at 96 (1914-2010) Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer, with interests also encompassing micromagic, scientific skepticism, philosophy, religion, and literature—especially ...more

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Persi Diaconis age 73 Persi Warren Diaconis is an American mathematician and former professional magician. He is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He is particularly ...more

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Boris Weisfeiler Boris Weisfeiler is a Russian-born mathematician who lived in the United States before going missing in Chile in 1985, aged 43. The Chilean military dictatorship claimed that he drowned, but his ...more

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James Alexander Green Died at 88 (1926-2014) James Alexander "Sandy" Green FRS was a mathematician and Professor at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick, who worked in the field of representation theory.

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D. Saari age 78 Donald Gene Saari is the Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Economics and director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California Irvine. He ...more

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James Joseph Sylvester Died at 83 (1814-1897) James Joseph Sylvester FRS was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory and combinatorics. He played a ...more

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J. Willard Gibbs Died at 64 (1839-1903) Josiah Willard Gibbs was an American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His work on the applications of thermodynamics was ...more

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Thomas L. Saaty age 92 Thomas L. Saaty is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. He is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the ...more

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Hassler Whitney Died at 82 (1907-1989) Hassler Whitney was a mathematician and mountaineer.

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Terence Tao age 42 Terence "Terry" Chi-Shen Tao FAA FRS, is an Australian-born Chinese American mathematician working in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, additive combinatorics, ergodic ...more

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Alfred Tarski Died at 82 (1901-1983) Alfred Tarski was a Polish logician, mathematician and philosopher. Educated at the University of Warsaw and a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and the Warsaw school of ...more

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Edward Norton Lorenz Died at 91 (1917-2008) Edward Norton Lorenz was an American mathematician, meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory. He introduced the strange attractor notion and coined the term butterfly effect.

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Leslie Lamport age 77 Leslie B. Lamport is an American computer scientist. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX. ...more

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Norbert Wiener Died at 70 (1894-1964) Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician and philosopher. He was Professor of Mathematics at MIT. A famous child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and noise ...more

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Andrew Odlyzko age 68 Andrew Michael Odlyzko is a mathematician and a former head of the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center and of the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.

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Howard Whitley Eves Died at 93 (1911-2004) Howard Whitley Eves was an American mathematician, known for his work in geometry and the history of mathematics. Eves received his B.S. from the University of Virginia, the M.A. from Harvard ...more

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Cathleen Synge Morawetz age 94 Cathleen Synge Morawetz is a mathematician. Morawetz's research was mainly in the study of the partial differential equations governing fluid flow, particularly those of mixed type occurring in ...more

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Serge Lang Died at 78 (1927-2005) Serge Lang was a French-born American mathematician. He is known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the influential Algebra. He was a member of the ...more

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Bernard Galler Died at 78 (1928-2006) Bernard A. Galler was an American mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Michigan who was involved in the development of large-scale operating systems and computer languages ...more

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Howard Percy Robertson Died at 58 (1903-1961) Howard Percy Robertson was an American mathematician and physicist known for contributions related to physical cosmology and the uncertainty principle. He was Professor of Mathematical Physics ...more

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Eugene Wigner Died at 93 (1902-1995) Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner, was a Hungarian American theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to ...more

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Rudolf E. Kálmán age 87 Rudolf Emil Kálmán is a Hungarian-born American electrical engineer, mathematician, and inventor. He is most noted for his co-invention and development of the Kalman filter, a ...more

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John L. Kelley Died at 83 (1916-1999) John L. Kelley was an American mathematician at University of California, Berkeley who worked in general topology and functional analysis. Kelley's 1955 text, General Topology, which eventually ...more

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Narendra Karmarkar age 61 Narendra Krishna Karmarkar is an Indian mathematician, who developed Karmarkar's algorithm. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.

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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita age 71 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Richard A. Tapia age 79 Richard Alfred Tapia is a renowned American mathematician and champion of under-represented minorities in the sciences. In recognition of his broad contributions, in 2005, Tapia was named ...more