Frames of Some Legendary Mathematical Geniuses
Srinivasa Ramanujan (December 22, 1887 – April 26, 1920)
A self-taught mathematician, Ramanujan stands as a symbol of Indian scientific genius, becoming the second Indian to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), 77 years after the first.
“It was a long, hard, grim winter. I was working a sixty-hour week at Bomber Command. The bomber losses which I was supposed to analyze were growing steadily higher. The end of the war was not in sight. In the evenings of that winter I kept myself sane by wandering in Ramanujan’s garden, reading the letters I was receiving from Bailey, working through Bailey’s ideas and discovering new Rogers-Ramanujan identities of my own. I found a lot of identities of the sort that Ramanujan would have enjoyed. … In the cold dark evenings, while I was scribbling these beautiful identities amid the death and destruction of 1944, I felt close to Ramanujan. He had been scribbling even more beautiful identities amid the death and destruction of 1917.”
— Freeman Dyson
(Renowned physicist and mathematician associated with the Institute for Advanced Study for over six decades.)
David Hilbert (1862 – 1943)
One of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hilbert set the research agenda for entire generations of 20th-century mathematicians by presenting 23 open problems in 1900 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris.
Maryna Viazovska
In 2022, she became the second woman in history, after Maryam Mirzakhani, to be awarded the Fields Medal.
“My dream is that women getting major prizes will be a routine event, not a special occasion. It should not be. Maybe this prize could have a positive effect on young women, but what is much more important is what happens early at school — the hard, everyday work that is done by parents, teachers, university professors.”
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 – 1855)
The great algebraist Richard Dedekind (1831 – 1916) wrote of his doctoral supervisor, the legendary “Prince of Mathematicians”, Carl Friedrich Gauss: “As a native of Brunswick I heard Gauss mentioned when I was young and was happy to believe in his greatness without understanding of what it consisted. It made a deeper impression on me when I first heard about his geometric representation of imaginary numbers or, as they were still called at that time, impossible quantities. By that time, as a student at the Collegium Carolineum, I had delved a little way into higher mathematics and, soon after, when Gauss celebrated the golden jubilee of his doctorate in 1849, he was sent congratulations by our faculty, which had been composed by the brilliant philologist Petri, in which the passage ‘he has made possible the impossible’ particularly attracted my attention.”
Terence Tao
Widely recognized as the Mozart of mathematics, Fields Medalist Terence Tao has conducted extraordinary research across diverse mathematical fields. He elevates both current and future generations of mathematicians through exemplary leadership and open mentorship.
Maryam Mirzakhani (1977 – 2017)
She changed the history of mathematics, not only by becoming the first woman to win the Fields Medal, but also by pioneering new frontiers in geometry.
“I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it. I can see that without being excited mathematics can look pointless and cold. The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.”
The School of Athens
A fresco by the great artist Raphael (1483 – 1520) painted in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City, depicting a gathering of ancient mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists, such as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Ptolemy, Thales, and Hypatia.
Paul Erdős (1913 – 1996)
The most prolific mathematician of the modern era, Paul Erdős authored over 1,500 high-quality papers, which inspired the creation of the famous “Erdős number.” His remarkable legacy includes 25 papers published in the prestigious Annals of Mathematics, a journal where publishing even a single article is an extraordinary achievement.
“It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You should also have an open mind at the right time.”
Hong Wang
“I hope everyone will have the courage to bravely do what they love.”
Awarded the Fields Medal in 2026, Hong Wang is the third woman to receive this honor and the second woman appointed as a permanent professor in the history of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS). Emmanuel Ullmo, director of the great institute, remarked of her work that “solving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions is the kind of result that reshapes the landscape of an entire field of research.”
Georg Cantor (1845 – 1918)
By founding modern set theory and introducing transfinite numbers, he revolutionized mathematics. His ideas were so far ahead of his time that many prominent mathematicians ridiculed him, and he spent much of his later life suffering from severe depression in psychiatric sanatoriums.
Legendary theoretical physicist and celebrated science popularizer Stephen Hawking (1942 – 2018) once wrote, “Cantor believed that there are only two types of infinite subsets of the real numbers, but he could not prove it. The resolution of this conjecture, now known as the Continuum Hypothesis, would have surprised Cantor. In 1940, Kurt Gödel showed that the Continuum Hypothesis cannot be disproved using the standard axioms of set theory; then in 1963, Paul Cohen proved that it cannot be proved using those axioms either!”
Bernhard Riemann (1826 – 1866)
“Riemann first extended Gauss’s train of thought to continua of any number of dimensions; with prophetic vision he saw the physical meaning of this generalization of Euclid’s geometry.” This statement by Albert Einstein serves as one of the finest introductions to Riemann’s work, though his genius extended far beyond geometry. He wrote only one paper on number theory, yet it contained an astonishingly insightful conjecture, now known as the Riemann Hypothesis, that amazed the entire mathematical world. When asked what his first question would be if awakened after 500 years, David Hilbert immediately replied, “I would ask: Has someone proved the Riemann Hypothesis?”
Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783)
“It is estimated that about one-third of all research papers in mathematics and physics in the eighteenth century were written by him. In 1775, at age 68, he wrote over fifty papers. The remarkable thing about that is that he had been totally blind since 1766! He wrote with the help of scribes and mathematical assistants (among them his son and grandson).”
— Barry Simon
(Renowned physicist and mathematician who served as a professor for 35 years at Caltech)
Euclid (c. 300 BC)
The great Renaissance artist Raphael (1483–1520) depicted Euclid in his famous fresco, The School of Athens, located in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City. The artwork features a gathering of legendary ancient mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists, such as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Ptolemy, Thales, and Hypatia.
Renowned author and University of Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy once said, “I would teach the world how the Greeks proved, more than 2,000 years ago, that there are infinitely many prime numbers. In my mind, this discovery is the beginning of mathematics — when humankind realised that, by pure thought alone, it could prove eternal truths of the universe.”
Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727)
“Never ever to forget that mathematics had for Newton, above and beyond its place as trusty tool-kit, an inner beauty and strength independent of all outward motivation and application. To those who are insensitive to the elegance and power of mathematics as an intellectual discipline in its own right, shorn of all footholds into the world at large, it is difficult to put over just why Newton should have interested himself (as he did at various times in his life) in such ‘useless’ topics as projective and transformational geometry or Diophantine number theory or the exact quadrature of algebraic multinomials; why it was important for him to take forty pages of his Principia to give solution of problems of circle-tangency and of anharmonic conic theory; why it mattered to him to seek numbers which can be expressed in two separate ways as the sum of two cubes (he, unlike G. H. Hardy two centuries later, would have needed no prompting from Ramanujan to appreciate the significance of 1729 in this respect); …”
— D. T. Whiteside
(A scholar best known for editing the monumental work ‘The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton’.)
The portrait was painted by Charles Jervas (c. 1675–1739), adapted from Sir Godfrey Kneller’s 1689 portrait.
Cédric Villani
2010 Fields Medalist Cédric Villani once said in a speech, “What is it that French people do better than all the others? If you would take polls, the top three answers might be: love, wine and whining. Maybe. But let me suggest a fourth one: mathematics. Did you know that Paris has more mathematicians than any other city in the world? And more streets with mathematicians’ names, too. And if you look at the statistics of the Fields Medal, … you will find that France has more Fields medalists per inhabitant than any other country.” In a similar vein, Villani commented in an interview, “It was because it was in the culture in the air.”
Peter Scholze
A 2018 Fields Medalist, Peter Scholze is a rare figure in the world of mathematics who does not merely solve hard problems, but changes the very language in which they are stated. Remarking on his foundational contributions, one researcher noted, “I think it’s fair to compare Peter to Grothendieck in this sense. He is reinventing everything somehow.”
Raman Parimala
She is one of the most distinguished mathematicians India has produced in the modern era. She was on the Abel Prize selection committee for the years 2022 and 2023.
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827)
Legendary theoretical physicist and celebrated science popularizer Stephen Hawking (1942 – 2018) once wrote,
“… The sun, planets, and the moons all rotated in the same direction as the earth. If the commonality in all twenty-nine motions was merely the result of chance, then the probability of that chance would be exceedingly small, , about 1 in 100 billion! Laplace recognized that the regularity in the heavens had to have a physical cause and he found it. He achieved what Newton had thought impossible. In the Mécanique céleste, Laplace demonstrated how the solar system could have arisen from a whirling solar atmosphere with planets whose moons formed as rotating balls of gas that cooled and condensed, with the revolutions necessarily in the same direction in almost the same plane about the sun.”
The portrait of Pierre-Simon Laplace is by Jean-Loup Charmet.
Timothy Gowers
1998 Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers fundamentally reshaped functional analysis and combinatorics. He revolutionized how research is conducted by launching the Polymath Project, proving that complex mathematical problems can be solved through online collaboration, and he has led major campaigns advocating for open-access academic publishing.
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