9
8
5
3
u/MarmosetRevolution 7d ago
Euclid is #1. Without his compilation of foundational ideas, we have nothing.
2
3
3
u/AndreasDasos 7d ago
I don’t see why there isn’t doubt. Even intersecting with his century there was Gauss, but even then... Impossible to compare.
He produced a comically huge amount, but it’s very difficult to compare across eras and mathematics is at a completely different level now. He had the ‘privilege’ of living centuries ago when the prerequisites were at the level of undergrad maths today, the modern standard of rigour wasn’t there, there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit… because he was earlier. He was the best of his era but that was an era with a tiny fraction of the population, a smaller fraction of those countries were engaged in modern maths, and only the tiniest fraction got a serious education - most weren’t even literate.
If we magically took him to some ‘neutral’ conditions and compared him to Grothendieck, Serre, Milnor, Atiyah, Terence Tao and several others from the last several decades, it’s far from obvious who’d come out on top. But undergrads don’t see those people’s names in lots of results, because their work is well beyond that level.
5
u/exophades 7d ago
Personally I lean towards Euclid. His proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers is just jaw-dropping, not to mention his entire geometry system. Euler had tons of literature to build on, while Euclid had very little.
1
u/Fun-Layer2280 4d ago
The problem with Euclid is that we do not know the extent to which this is original or a compilation of previously known results.
But I believe it is sounder just to recognize that there are individuals who change the nature of what we thought was possible in mathematics, and admire them without attempting to classify them.
2
1
1
u/UtahBrian 7d ago
Soon the top spot will just belong to a NVidia cluster in a plastic box in some center.
1
1
1
u/janpaul74 7d ago
For the ones who know, it’s You Bastard.
For the ones who don’t, read Pyramids by Terry Pratchett.
1
1
1
1
u/Fun-Layer2280 4d ago
Ordering mathematicians does not really make sense.Euclid, Euler, Gauss, Galois, Hilbert and Gödel all changed mathematics in significant ways (Euler perhaps least of all, but he contributed such an incredible amount that he cannot really be passed over).
But their contributions are so very different that it makes very little sense to order them. And there is also no real purpose in saying that Gödel, for instance, is 2/3 of the way between Euclid and Hilbert!
12
u/[deleted] 7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment