Mathematician:Mathematicians/Sorted By Birth/1851 - 1900 CE

For more comprehensive information on the lives and works of mathematicians through the ages, see the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, created by John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson.

The army of those who have made at least one definite contribution to mathematics as we know it soon becomes a mob as we look back over history; 6,000 or 8,000 names press forward for some word from us to preserve them from oblivion, and once the bolder leaders have been recognised it becomes largely a matter of arbitrary, illogical legislation to judge who of the clamouring multitude shall be permitted to survive and who be condemned to be forgotten.

-- Eric Temple Bell: Men of Mathematics, 1937, Victor Gollancz, London

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$\text {1851}$ – $\text {1860}$

1851

February

Hermann Paasche $($$\text {1851}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$

German statistician and economist.

Best known for his Paasche Index, which provides a calculation of the Price Index.
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March

George Chrystal $($$\text {1851}$ – $\text {1911}$$)$

Scots mathematician primarily remembered for his books on algebra and for his studies of wave patterns in large inland bodies of water.
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June

Silvanus Phillips Thompson $($$\text {1851}$ – $\text {1916}$$)$

English professor of physics, known for his work as an electrical engineer and as an author.

Author of the $1910$ text Calculus Made Easy, which teaches the fundamentals of infinitesimal calculus, and is still in print.
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August

George Francis FitzGerald $($$\text {1851}$ – $\text {1901}$$)$

Irish academic and physicist known for his work in electromagnetic theory and for the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.
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1852

François Proth $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1879}$$)$

French farmer who was also a self-taught mathematician.

Known for his analysis of Proth numbers and Proth primes.

Formulated Gilbreath's Conjecture on successive differences of primes, $80$ years before Norman Laurence Gilbreath, but his proof was incorrect.
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January

Giovanni Frattini $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$

Italian mathematician noted for his contributions to group theory.
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Clarence Abiathar Waldo $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1926}$$)$

American mathematician, author and educator today most famous for the role he played in the Indiana Pi Bill affair.
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April

Carl Louis Ferdinand von Lindemann $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1939}$$)$

German mathematician who made his mark by publishing a proof in $1882$ that $\pi$ is transcendental.
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July

William Burnside $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$

English mathematician who was one of the earliest researchers in group theory.
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December

Antoine Henri Becquerel $($$\text {1852}$ – $\text {1908}$$)$

French engineer and physicist who discovered radioactivity.
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1853

January

Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro $($$\text {1853}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$

Italian mathematician most famous as the inventor of tensor calculus, which he did in collaboration with Tullio Levi-Civita.
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April

Arthur Moritz Schönflies $($$\text {1853}$ – $\text {1928}$$)$

German mathematician known for his contributions to the application of group theory to crystallography, and for work in topology.
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Frederick Haller Stevens $($$\text {1853}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

English mathematician best known for his text books.
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July

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz $($$\text {1853}$ – $\text {1928}$$)$

Dutch physicist who shared the $1902$ Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect.

Also derived the transformation equations underpinning Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity.
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December

Evgraf Stepanovich Fedorov $($$\text {1853}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$

Russian mathematician, crystallographer and mineralogist.

Best known in the mathematics world for enumerating the $3$-dimensional space groups, now known as the Fedorov groups.
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1854

James Gow $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1923}$$)$

English scholar, educator, historian, and author, widely recognized for A Short History of Greek Mathematics.
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January

August Otto Föppl $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1924}$$)$

German mathematician credited with introducing Föppl-Klammer theory and the Föppl-von Kármán Equations.
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March

Joseph Edwards $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {???}$$)$

English professor of mathematics best known for his textbooks.
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April

Hertha Marks Ayrton $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1923}$$)$

British engineer, mathematician, physicist, and inventor.

Awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.
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Jules Henri Poincaré $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1912}$$)$

French mathematician and philosopher.

Often referred to as "The last universalist", as he was the last one able to master the whole of mathematics at the time. (Since then the field has grown too large.)

Introduced the field of special relativity.
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May

Hans Carl Friedrich von Mangoldt $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$

German mathematician who contributed towards the solution of the Prime Number Theorem.
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June

Robert Hjalmar Mellin $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

Finnish mathematician and who majored in functional theory.

Best known for the Mellin transform.
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September

Percy Alexander MacMahon $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$

British mathematician especially noted in connection with the partitions of numbers and enumerative combinatorics.
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November

Johannes Robert Rydberg $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$

Swedish physicist mainly known for devising the Rydberg Formula.
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Johan Ludvig Heiberg $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1928}$$)$

Danish historian best known for discovering previously unknown texts of Archimedes.

Also published an edition of Euclid's The Elements.
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December

Isaak Bacharach $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

German mathematics professor who proved the Cayley-Bacharach Theorem on intersections of cubic curves.
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Alfred Mortimer Nesbitt $($$\text {1854}$ – $\text {1926}$$)$

English mathematician, schoolteacher and musician best known for Nesbitt's Inequality.
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1855

January

Christian Sophus Juel $($$\text {1855}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$

Danish mathematician specializing in geometry.
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July

George Arthur Plimpton $($$\text {1855}$ – $\text {1936}$$)$

American publisher and philanthropist, whose contribution to mathematics was his collection of rare ancient mathematical works which he donated to the Nicholas Murray Butler Library of Columbia University.
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August

Alfredo Capelli $($$\text {1855}$ – $\text {1910}$$)$

Italian mathematician best known for Capelli's Identity.

Also pioneered the notation $x^{\overline k}$ and $x^{\underline k}$ for rising factorial and falling factorial respectively.
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November

John Edward Aloysius Steggall $($$\text {1855}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$

British mathematician and educator whose research interests were in the theory of numbers and in kinematical geometry.
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1856

February

Micaiah John Muller Hill $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$

English mathematician, known for Hill's spherical vortex and Hill's tetrahedra.
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June

Andrey Andreyevich Markov $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$

Russian mathematician best known for his work on stochastic processes.
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Paul Friedrich Wolfskehl $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1906}$$)$

German physician with an interest in mathematics.

He bequeathed $100\,000$ marks (equivalent to $£ 1\,000\,000$ pounds in $1997$ money) to the first person to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.

By the time the prize was finally awarded to Andrew John Wiles on $27$ June $1997$, the monetary value of the award had dwindled to $£30\,000$.
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July

Nikola Tesla $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
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Giacinto Morera $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1909}$$)$

Italian mathematician and engineer best remembered for his work in complex analysis and the theory of linear elasticity.
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Charles Émile Picard $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

French mathematician who made significant advances in the fields of:

• Complex Analysis
• Differential Equations
• Algebraic Topology

Son-in-law of Charles Hermite.
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August

Carl David Tolmé Runge $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$

German mathematician, physicist, and spectroscopist.

Best known as the co-developer (with Martin Wilhelm Kutta) of the Runge-Kutta methods in the field of numerical analysis.

Also known for his work on the Zeeman effect.

His work paved the way for the Thue-Siegel-Roth Theorem in the field of Diophantine equations.
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October

Ernest William Hobson $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

English mathematician, now remembered mostly for his books.
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November

Charles Planck $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$

English mathematician best known for his discovery of an order $9$ perfect magic cube, accomplished in $1905$.
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December

Walther Franz Anton von Dyck $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

German mathematician who was one of the pioneers of group theory.

The first to define a group in the abstract sense. The first to study a group by generators.

A student of Felix Klein.
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Joseph John Thomson $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1940}$$)$

British physicist credited with the discovery of the electron.
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Thomas Joannes Stieltjes $($$\text {1856}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$

Dutch mathematician whose main fields of study included continued fractions and measure theory.
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1857

Erwin Papperitz $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1938}$$)$

German mathematician who worked on the hypergeometric differential equation.
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February

William Roger Paton $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1921}$$)$

Scottish scholar of Greek who provided a translation of The Greek Anthology Book XIV containing mathematical puzzles and riddles.
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Heinrich Rudolf Hertz $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1894}$$)$

German physicist who first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.
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March

Karl Pearson $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1936}$$)$

Influential English mathematician and biometrician.

Credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.

Contributed significantly to the field of biometrics, meteorology, theories of social Darwinism and eugenics.
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April

Henry Ernest Dudeney $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1930}$$)$

English author and self-taught mathematician who specialised in logic puzzles and mathematical games.

Considered one of Britain's foremost creators of mathematical puzzles.

Known for his collaborations with Sam Loyd.
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May

Alexander Yule Fraser $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1890}$$)$

Scottish mathematician who was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society.
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Oskar Bolza $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

German mathematician best known for his research in the calculus of variations, particularly influenced by Karl Weierstrass's $1879$ lectures on the subject.
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June

Aleksandr Mikhailovich Lyapunov $($$\text {1857}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$

Russian mathematician, mechanician and physicist, known for his development of the stability theory of a dynamical system, as well as for his many contributions to mathematical physics and probability theory.
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1858

April

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck $($$\text {1858}$ – $\text {1947}$$)$

German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in $1918$.
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May

Édouard Jean-Baptiste Goursat $($$\text {1858}$ – $\text {1936}$$)$

French mathematician best known for his work in complex analysis.
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June

Andrew Russell Forsyth $($$\text {1858}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

Scottish mathematician best known for his textbooks on differential equations and calculus of variations.
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August

Giuseppe Peano $($$\text {1858}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$

Italian mathematician who contributed significantly to the founding of the fields of mathematical logic and set theory.

Invented many of the symbols used today in these fields.

Worked on the axiomatization of mathematics, and contributed greatly towards the method of mathematical induction.
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1859

February

Florian Cajori $($$\text {1859}$ – $\text {1930}$$)$

Swiss-born American mathematician who specialized in (and in fact pioneered) the field of mathematics history.
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March

Ernesto Cesàro $($$\text {1859}$ – $\text {1906}$$)$

Italian mathematician who worked mainly in the fields of differential geometry and number theory.
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Samuil Osipovich Shatunovsky $($$\text {1859}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$

Ukrainian mathematician who focused on several topics in mathematical analysis and algebra, such as group theory, number theory and geometry.
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Adolf Hurwitz $($$\text {1859}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$

German mathematician who was an early master of the theory of Riemann surfaces.
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May

Johan Ludwig William Valdemar Jensen $($$\text {1859}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$

Danish mathematician and engineer best known for Jensen's Inequality and Jensen's Formula.
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August

Georg Alexander Pick $($$\text {1859}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

Austrian mathematician best known for Pick's Theorem for determining the area of lattice polygons.
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December

Otto Ludwig Hölder $($$\text {1859}$ – $\text {1937}$$)$

German mathematician most famous for his work in analysis (in particular Fourier series) and group theory.
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1860

January

David Eugene Smith $($$\text {1860}$ – $\text {1944}$$)$

American mathematician and educator best known for his translations of classics.
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February

Mathias Lerch $($$\text {1860}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$

Czech mathematician best known for his work on mathematical analysis and number theory.
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May

Jan Cornelis Kluyver $($$\text {1860}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$

Dutch mathematician who made important contributions to analysis, number theory and geometry.

Professor at Leiden University between 1892 and 1930.
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Samuel Giuseppe Vito Volterra $($$\text {1860}$ – $\text {1940}$$)$

Italian mathematician and physicist, known for his contributions to mathematical biology and integral equations.

One of the founders of functional analysis.
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June

Alicia Boole Stott $($$\text {1860}$ – $\text {1940}$$)$

Irish-English mathematician who made substantial contributions to the field of four-dimensional geometry, which she famously grasped at a very early age.

Coined the word polytope.
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September

Frank Morley $($$\text {1860}$ – $\text {1937}$$)$

English, later American, mathematician, known mostly for his teaching and research in the fields of algebra and geometry.
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$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1870}$

1861

February

Alfred North Whitehead $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1947}$$)$

English mathematician who also studied philosophy.

Best known for his co-authorship with Bertrand Arthur William Russell of Principia Mathematica, published from 1910.
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George Ballard Mathews $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$

English mathematician who taught alongside Andrew Gray, with whom he coauthored a textbook on Bessel functions.

Also noted for his textbooks on number theory and projective geometry.
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March

Rao Bahadur Malur Rangacharya $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1916}$$)$

Indian scholastic best known for his translation of the work of Mahaviracharya.
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May

Conrad Heinrich Edmund Friedrich Busche $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1916}$$)$

German number theorist who did a lot of work on replicative functions and quadratic residues.
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Henry Laurence Gantt $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$

American mechanical engineer and management consultant who is best known for his work in the development of scientific management.
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August

Ivar Otto Bendixson $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$

Swedish mathematician who worked mainly in the fields of set theory, analysis and differential equations.
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Cesare Burali-Forti $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1931}$$)$

Italian mathematician best known for discovering what is now known as the Burali-Forti Paradox.

Disbelieved in the Theory of Relativity, and even went so far as to write a book attempting to refute it.
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September

Percy John Heawood $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

English mathematician who devoted his working life to the Four Color Theorem.

In $1890$, exposed a flaw in Alfred Bray Kempe's proof, that had been considered as valid for $11$ years.

He never actually proved the theorem, which remained open until it was finally proved in $1976$ by Kenneth Ira Appel and Wolfgang Haken.
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Frank Nelson Cole $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1926}$$)$

American mathematician famous for finding the factors of the Mersenne number $M_{67}$. (It had already been demonstrated by Édouard Lucas in $1876$ that it is not prime, but till this time the factors had not been found.)

Cole's demonstration of this in $1903$ took the form of a now famous lecture On The Factorization of Large Numbers in which he performed the necessary arithmetic on a blackboard, delivering the only totally wordless lecture in recorded history.

The American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize was named in his honor.
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October

Thomas Little Heath $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1940}$$)$

English Civil servant who is best known for his scholarly translations of the Greek classics of mathematics into English.
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November

Paul Rudolf Eugen Jahnke $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1921}$$)$

German mathematician best known for his $1909$ Funktionentafeln mit Formeln und Kurven.
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December

Friedrich Engel $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

German mathematician specialising in partial differential equations.
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Kurt Wilhelm Sebastian Hensel $($$\text {1861}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

German mathematician best known for his introduction of $p$-adic numbers.
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1862

January

David Hilbert $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

One of the most influential mathematicians in the late $19$th and early $20$th century.

Most famous for the Hilbert $23$, a list he delivered in $1900$ of $23$ problems which were at the time still unsolved.
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Eliakim Hastings Moore $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$

American mathematician working in abstract algebra and the foundations of geometry, among others.
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March

Philbert Maurice d'Ocagne $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1938}$$)$

French engineer and mathematician who founded the field of nomography and invented the nomogram.
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Leonard James Rogers $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

English mathematician famous for the Rogers-Ramanujan Identities and for proving a special case of Hölder's inequality.
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May

Gino Benedetto Loria $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

Italian mathematician and historian of mathematics.
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June

Lothar Wilhelm Julius Heffter $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

German mathematician best known for his work on function theory and analysis.

Also worked on the Four Color Theorem.
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August

Jules Antoine Richard $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

French mathematician best known for Richard's Paradox.
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Roberto Marcolongo $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

Italian mathematician, known for his research in vector calculus and theoretical physics.
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December

Wilhelm Weinberg $($$\text {1862}$ – $\text {1937}$$)$

German obstetrician-gynecologist who expressed the concept that would later come to be known as the Hardy-Weinberg Principle.
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1863

February

Axel Thue $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$

Norwegian mathematician, known for his original work in diophantine approximation and combinatorics.
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March

James Watt (II) $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

Scottish lawyer and actuary with an interest in science.
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May

John Charles Fields $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$

Canadian mathematician, best known as the founder of the Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics.
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July

Alfred Heinrich Bucherer $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$

German physicist known for his experiments on relativistic mass.

The first to use the phrase "theory of relativity" for Einstein's theory of special relativity.
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Herbert William Richmond $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1948}$$)$

English mathematician who did considerable work in the field of algebraic geometry.

Most famous now for his construction of the regular $17$-gon.

Worked on ballistics during World War I, the results of which influenced continuing work on the subject in World War II.
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September

Lars Edvard Phragmén $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1937}$$)$

Swedish mathematician who contributed towards the field of complex function theory.

Also contributed towards the field of insurance mathematics.
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Charles Edward Spearman $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

English psychologist who worked in statistics.

Known for Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.
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October

William Henry Young $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

English mathematician, who worked on measure theory, Fourier series, differential calculus amongst other fields.

Made brilliant and long-lasting contributions to the study of functions of several complex variables.
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November

Walter Percy Workman $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$

English mathematician and schoolmaster best known for the school textbooks he wrote.

A proponent of the metric system.
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William Fleetwood Sheppard $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1936}$$)$

Australian-British civil servant, mathematician and statistician remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation and statistical theory.

Known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard's corrections.
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December

Paul Painlevé $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

French mathematician who worked on differential equations and the emerging new physics.

Later in life became Prime Minister of France.
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Henri Eugène Padé $($$\text {1863}$ – $\text {1953}$$)$

French mathematician best known for his development of Padé approximation techniques for functions using rational functions.
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1864

Edgar Jerome Townsend $($$\text {1864}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

American mathematician best known for his translation of David Hilbert's $1899$ work Grundlagen der Geometrie.
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March

William Fogg Osgood $($$\text {1864}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

American mathematician working in complex analysis, in particular conformal mapping and uniformization of analytic functions, and calculus of variations.

Wrote on the theory of the gyroscope.
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József Kürschák $($$\text {1864}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician noted for his work on trigonometry and for his creation of the theory of valuations.
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Alwin Reinhold Korselt $($$\text {1864}$ – $\text {1947}$$)$

German mathematician best known for Korselt's Theorem which provides a definition for Carmichael numbers.

Contributed an early result in relational algebra.
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June

Hermann Minkowski $($$\text {1864}$ – $\text {1909}$$)$

Created and developed the field of geometry of numbers.
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1865

April

Charles Proteus Steinmetz $($$\text {1865}$ – $\text {1923}$$)$

Prussian-born American mathematician and electrical engineer and professor at Union College.

Fostered development of alternating current that enabled expansion of electric power industry in United States.

Formulated mathematical theories for engineers.

Explained the phenomenon of hysteresis.
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May

Alfred Cardew Dixon $($$\text {1865}$ – $\text {1936}$$)$

English mathematician well known for his work in differential equations.

Did early work on Fredholm integral equations independently of Fredholm.

Worked both on ordinary differential equations and on partial differential equations studying Abelian integrals, automorphic functions, and functional equations.
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Pieter Zeeman $($$\text {1865}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

Dutch physicist who shared the $1902$ Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Antoon Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect.
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October

Willem Abraham Wythoff $($$\text {1865}$ – $\text {1939}$$)$

Dutch mathematician known for his work in in combinatorial game theory and number theory.

Also known for his work in geometry, in particular for the Wythoff construction of uniform tilings and uniform polyhedra.
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December

Jacques Salomon Hadamard $($$\text {1865}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

French mathematician who contributed in the fields of:

• Number Theory
• Complex Function Theory
• Differential Geometry
• Partial Differential Equations
• Functional Analysis

Most famous for proving the Prime Number Theorem in $1896$, independently of Charles de la Vallée Poussin.
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1866

January

Ludwig August Paul Wernicke $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {???}$$)$

German, later American, mathematician who contributed to the Four Color Theorem.
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Gustav de Vries $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

Dutch mathematician known for his work on the Korteweg-de Vries equation, together with Diederik Johannes Korteweg.
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April

Erik Ivar Fredholm $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$

Swedish mathematician best known for his work on integral equations and spectral theory.
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June

James P. Pierpont $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {1938}$$)$

American mathematician working first in Galois theory, and then in real and complex analysis.
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August

Charles de la Vallée Poussin $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

Belgian mathematician famous for proving the Prime Number Theorem, independently of Jacques Salomon Hadamard in $1896$.
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November

George Godfrey Berry $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {1930}$$)$

Presumably English scholar, about whom little is known, who gave his name to the Berry Paradox.

His understanding of logic and the concepts underpinning mathematical logic was a strong influence on Bertrand Russell.
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Georg Wilhelm Scheffers $($$\text {1866}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

German mathematician whose specialty was differential geometry.

Also a writer of several well-received textbooks.
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1867

March

Karl Zsigmondy $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$

Austrian mathematician of Hungarian ethnicity, best known for Zsigmondy's Theorem, discovered in $1882$.
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April

James Cullen $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

Irish Jesuit priest who also developed some results in number theory.
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June

John Dougall $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

Scottish mathematician best known for his work in combinatorics.
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July

Derrick Norman Lehmer $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1938}$$)$

American mathematician active mainly in the field of number theory.

The father of Derrick Henry ("Dick") Lehmer.
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August

Charles Albert Noble $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

American mathematician who worked mainly on differential equations.
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Maxime Bôcher $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$

American mathematician who worked on differential equations, series, and algebra.
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November

Martin Wilhelm Kutta $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1944}$$)$

German mathematician best known for co-developing (with Carl David Tolmé Runge) of the Runge-Kutta methods in the field of numerical analysis.

Also known for the Zhukovsky-Kutta Aerofoil.
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Maria Salomea Curie $($$\text {1867}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

Polish-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity..
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1868

Edward Brind Escott $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1946}$$)$

American mathematics teacher and insurance actuary whose expertise was in number theory.

Contributed a number of results in recreational mathematics.
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March

Grace Emily Chisholm Young $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1944}$$)$

English mathematician who became the first woman to receive a doctorate in Germany, in any field.
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Robert Andrews Millikan $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1953}$$)$

American experimental physicist who worked with Harvey Fletcher on measuring the elementary electric charge.

Also worked on the photoelectric effect.
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May

John Fillmore Hayford $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1925}$$)$

American Geodesist.

Constructed the Hayford spheroid as a reference for approximating the shape of Earth.
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June

Frank Irwin $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1948}$$)$

American mathematician who worked in the field of invariants.
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Gilbert Thomas Walker $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1958}$$)$

English physicist and statistician.

Studied mathematics and applied it to a variety of fields including aerodynamics, electromagnetism and the analysis of time-series data.

Worked for Indian Meteorological Department on statistical approaches to predict the monsoons.

Developed the Yule-Walker equations.

Instrumental in aiding the early career of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
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November

Felix Hausdorff $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

German mathematician fundamental in the development of modern topology.

Also active in set theory, measure theory and function theory.

The first to formulate what is now known as the Generalized Continuum Hypothesis.
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December

Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics.
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Emanuel Lasker $($$\text {1868}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

German philosopher and mathematician who was also one of the greatest chess-players of all time.

Inventor of the game now known as Lasca.
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1869

Percival Abbott $($$\text {1869}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

British mathematician known for writing accessible textbooks for self-learning.
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April

Élie Joseph Cartan $($$\text {1869}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

Influential French mathematician who did fundamental work in the theory of Lie groups and their geometric applications.

Made significant contributions to mathematical physics, differential geometry, and group theory.
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June

Karl Theodor Vahlen $($$\text {1869}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

Austrian-born mathematician and professor who co-founded Deutsche Mathematik.
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August

Mary Frances Winston Newson $($$\text {1869}$ – $\text {1959}$$)$

American mathematician who became the first female American to receive a PhD in mathematics from a European university, namely the University of Göttingen in Germany.
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November

Arthur Lyon Bowley $($$\text {1869}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

English statistician and economist who worked on economic statistics and pioneered the use of sampling techniques in social surveys.
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December

Dmitri Fyodorovich Egorov $($$\text {1869}$ – $\text {1931}$$)$

Russian mathematician noted for his contributions to differential geometry and analysis.

His religious views caused him to fall foul of the Soviet regime and he died as a result of a hunger strike he embarked upon while in prison for being a "religious sectarian".
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1870

January

Niels Fabian Helge von Koch $($$\text {1870}$ – $\text {1924}$$)$

Swedish mathematician who gave his name to the famous fractal known as the Koch curve, one of the earliest fractal curves to be described.
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February

Horatio Scott Carslaw $($$\text {1870}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

Scottish-Australian mathematician best known for his work on the conduction of heat in solids.
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March

Ernst Leonard Lindelöf $($$\text {1870}$ – $\text {1946}$$)$

Finnish topologist who also worked on differential equations and the gamma function.

Wrote a series of highly-regarded textbooks and published extensively on the history of Finnish mathematics.
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October

Henri Claudius Rosaris Dulac $($$\text {1870}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

French mathematician majoring in differential equations and real analysis.
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$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1880}$

1871

January

Gino Fano $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1952}$$)$

Italian mathematician best known as the founder of the finite geometry.
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Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

French mathematician working mainly in measure theory and its applications to probability theory.
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February

George Udny Yule $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

Scottish statistician, particularly known for the Yule distribution.
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May

Vladimir Andreyevich Markov $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1897}$$)$

Russian mathematician noted for the solution of the Markov Brothers' Inequality, with his elder brother Andrey Andreyevich Markov.

Died of tuberculosis at the tragically young age of 25.
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James Mark McGinnis Barr $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1950}$$)$

Electrical engineer, physicist, inventor, and polymath.

Coined the use of $\Phi$ and $\phi$ for the golden mean $1 \cdotp 618 \ldots$ and its reciprocal $0 \cdotp 618 \ldots$ respectively.
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June

Ernst Steinitz $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1928}$$)$

German mathematician working in field theory.
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July

Ernst Friedrich Ferdinand Zermelo $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1953}$$)$

German mathematician best known for his work on the foundations of mathematics.

Laid the groundwork (later to be enhanced by Abraham Fraenkel) for what are now known as the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of axiomatic set theory.
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August

Ernest Rutherford $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1937}$$)$

New Zealand physicist who discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, the radioactive element radon, and differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation.
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November

Poul Heegaard $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1948}$$)$

Danish mathematician active in the field of topology.

With Max Wilhelm Dehn, solved the problem of Classification of Compact Two-Manifolds.
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Giovanni Giorgi $($$\text {1871}$ – $\text {1950}$$)$

Italian physicist and electrical engineer who proposed the Giorgi system of measurement, the precursor to the International System of Units (SI).
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1872

January

Peruvemba Venkatesvara Seshu Aiyar $($$\text {1872}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$

Indian mathematician best known for contributing towards the general publication of the work of Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan.
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May

Bertrand Arthur William Russell $($$\text {1872}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

British philosopher, mathematician and logician.

Best known for his co-authorship with Alfred North Whitehead of Principia Mathematica, published from $1910$.
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August

Horace Scudder Uhler $($$\text {1872}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

American physicist who worked on geometrical optics, spectroscopy and X-rays.

As a mathematician, demonstrated several Mersenne numbers to be composite without finding one single Mersenne prime.

Also calculated the values of many irrational numbers such as logarithms, reciprocals and roots to a colosssal number of decimal places.

Published the value of $\map {\log_{10} } {9^{9^9} }$ to $250$ decimal places in $1947$.
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1873

Charles Godfrey $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1924}$$)$

British mathematician best known for his textbooks.
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Sydney George Starling $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

British physicist whose specialty was in electricity and magnetism.
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January

Hans Frederick Blichfeldt $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

Danish and American mathematician who worked on group theory and the geometry of numbers.
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March

Tullio Levi-Civita $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

Italian mathematician most famous for his work on absolute differential calculus (tensor calculus) and its applications to the theory of relativity.

His work covered celestial mechanics (notably on the three-body problem), analytic mechanics and hydrodynamics.
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March

Alfred Young $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1940}$$)$

British mathematician known for his work in the area of group theory.
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May

John Hilton Grace $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1958}$$)$

British mathematician best known for his contribution to the Grace-Walsh-Szegő Coincidence Theorem
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July

Fritz Emde $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

German electronic engineer and high school teacher, best known for his co-authorship with Eugen Jahnke of Funktionentafeln mit Formeln und Kurven.
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September

Constantin Carathéodory $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1950}$$)$

German-Greek mathematician who contributed to the theory of functions of a real variable, the calculus of variations and measure theory.

Also worked on rationalisation of the theory of thermodynamics.
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Julian Lowell Coolidge $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

American mathematician and a professor and chairman of the Harvard University Mathematics Department.
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October

Edmund Taylor Whittaker $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

English mathematician who contributed widely to applied mathematics, mathematical physics and the theory of special functions.

Principally interested in numerical analysis.

Worked on celestial mechanics and the history of physics.
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December

Heinrich Dörrie $($$\text {1873}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

German teacher of mathematics and author of several specialist books.
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1874

January

René-Louis Baire $($$\text {1874}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$

French mathematician who worked mainly on the theory of continuity and irrational numbers.

Most famous for the Baire Category Theorem.
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Leonard Eugene Dickson $($$\text {1874}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

One of the first American mathematicians to work in abstract algebra.

Also remembered for his history of number theory.
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April

Edward Vermilye Huntington $($$\text {1874}$ – $\text {1952}$$)$

American mathematician who worked on the foundations of mathematics.
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May

Friedrich Moritz Hartogs $($$\text {1874}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

German mathematician who made advances in set theory and complex analysis.

Killed himself as a result of the treatment he had received from the government of his country at the time.
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1875

January

Issai Schur $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

Jewish mathematician of Russian descent working mainly in group theory and combinatorics.

Worked most of his life in Germany, then emigrated to Palestine in 1939 as a result of political persecution, and died a pauper.
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February

Thomas John I'Anson Bromwich $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$

English all-rounder mathematician who committed suicide from mental illness supposedly brought on by overwork.
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Yoshio Mikami $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1950}$$)$

Japanese mathematician and historian of Japanese mathematics.
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March

Frank Lauren Hitchcock $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

American mathematician and physicist known for his formulation of the transportation problem in $1941$.
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Vladimir Sergeyevitch Ignatowski $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

Russian physicist who wrote on special relativity.

The first to try to derive the Lorentz transformation by group theory only using the relativity principle.
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Max Abraham $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1922}$$)$

German physicist who studied under Max Planck.

Developed a theory of the electron in $1902$ which was later superseded by different models.
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May

Beppo Levi $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1961}$$)$

Italian mathematician best known for his work on algebraic curves and Lebesgue integration.
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June

Henri Léon Lebesgue $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

French mathematician famous mainly for his work on the theory of integral calculus.
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July

Ernst Sigismund Fischer $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

Austrian mathematician who worked in the field of analysis.

Worked with Emmy Noether.
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August

Giuseppe Vitali $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$

Italian mathematician who worked in several branches of analysis.

Best known for the Vitali set: a subset of the real numbers which is not Lebesgue measurable.
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October

André-Louis Cholesky $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1918}$$)$

French military officer, geodesist, and mathematician.
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Gilbert Newton Lewis $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1946}$$)$

American physical chemist who also researched on relativity and quantum physics.

Coined the term photon in $1926$.
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December

Francesco Paolo Cantelli $($$\text {1875}$ – $\text {1966}$$)$

Italian mathematician best known for his work in probability theory, and for the Borel-Cantelli Lemma.
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1876

January

Erhard Schmidt $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1959}$$)$

Baltic German mathematician whose work significantly influenced the direction of mathematics in the twentieth century.
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Robert John Tainsh Bell $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

Scottish mathematician noted for his work in solid geometry.
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April

Paul Antoine Aristide Montel $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$

French mathematician who researched mostly on holomorphic functions in complex analysis.
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May

Heinrich Wilhelm Ewald Jung $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1953}$$)$

German mathematician who specialized in geometry and algebraic geometry.
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Gilbert Ames Bliss $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

American mathematician, known for his work on the calculus of variations.
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James Gordon Gray $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

Scottish mathematician and physicist.
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June

William Sealy Gosset $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1937}$$)$

English statistician most famous for Student's $t$-distribution.

Had a close friendship with Karl Pearson and Ronald Aylmer Fisher.
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September

Earle Raymond Hedrick $($$\text {1876}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

American mathematician who adopted the position of vice-president of the University of California.
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1877

Joseph George Coffin $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

American mathematician who worked in vector analysis.
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February

Godfrey Harold Hardy $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1947}$$)$

English mathematician noted for his work in number theory and analysis.

Also famous for his discovery and mentorship of Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan.

Non-mathematicians remember him mainly for his book A Mathematician's Apology.
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Edmund Georg Hermann Landau $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1938}$$)$

German mathematician who worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis.
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May

James Colquhoun Irvine $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1952}$$)$

Scottish organic chemist.

Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews from $1921$ until his death.

Worked on the application of methylation techniques to carbohydrates.

Isolated the first methylated sugars, trimethyl and tetramethyl glucose.
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September

Frederick Soddy $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

English radiochemist who, along with Ernest Rutherford, formulated the theory that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements, now known to involve nuclear reactions.

Also proved the existence of isotopes of certain radioactive elements.

Best known in the mathematical world for Soddy Circles and Soddy's Hexlet.
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James Hopwood Jeans $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1946}$$)$

English physicist, astronomer and mathematician.
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Georg Karl Wilhelm Hamel $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

German mathematician with interests in mechanics, the foundations of mathematics and function theory.
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December

Tommaso Boggio $($$\text {1877}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

Italian mathematician who worked in mathematical physics, differential geometry, analysis, and financial mathematics.
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1878

January

Agner Krarup Erlang $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$

Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory.
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February

Walther Ritz $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1909}$$)$

Swiss theoretical physicist most famous for his work with Johannes Robert Rydberg on the Rydberg-Ritz Combination Principle.

Also known for the variational method named after him, the Ritz method.
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Felix Bernstein $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

German mathematician working mainly in set theory.

He is best known for his $1897$ contribution to what is now known as the Cantor-Bernstein-Schröder Theorem.
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Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1929}$$)$

French mathematician and astronomer whose main contributions were in the field of analysis.
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April

Edward Kasner $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

American mathematician best known now for coining the terms googol and googolplex.
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June

Leopold Löwenheim $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

German mathematician whose work pioneered the field of model theory.

Much of his unpublished work was lost when the British brutally bombed his house in $1943$, an act of unforgivable barbarism for which the Brits have never delivered appropriate recompense.
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July

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist who was also a champion chess player.

Member of the Irish peerage.

Invented a number of chess puzzles.
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September

Maurice René Fréchet $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

French mathematician who made considerable advances in topology, and pioneered the concept of metric spaces.
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November

Max Wilhelm Dehn $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1952}$$)$

German mathematician most famous for his work in geometry, topology and geometric group theory.

Resolved Hilbert's third problem in $1900$, making him the first to resolve one of Hilbert's $23$ problems.

With Poul Heegaard, solved the problem of Classification of Compact Two-Manifolds.
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December

Jan Łukasiewicz $($$\text {1878}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

Polish philosopher who contributed significantly to logic.

Most famous for his innovation Polish notation, a technique which allows one to write expressions without the need for parentheses.
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1879

Edwin Raymond Smith $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {?}$$)$

American (?) mathematician who co-authored a book of mathematical tables with Robert Daniel Carmichael.
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January

Guido Fubini $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

Italian mathematician best known for Fubini's Theorem and the Fubini-Study metric.
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March

Robert Daniel Carmichael $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1967}$$)$

American mathematician who contributed mainly to the fields of differential equations and number theory.
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Albert Einstein $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

German-born mathematician and physicist. Probably the most famous scientist of all time.
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April

Edwin Bidwell Wilson $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1964}$$)$

American mathematician working in vector analysis and probability theory.
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September

Hans Hahn $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

Austrian mathematician who worked in the fields of functional analysis, topology, set theory, the calculus of variations, real analysis, and order theory.
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October

Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1919}$$)$

British logician whose work was in the fields of mathematical logic and the foundations of set theory.

He also applied his results in logic to the field of physics.
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November

John Wesley Young $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1932}$$)$

American mathematician who introduced the axioms of projective geometry with Oswald Veblen.
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Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville $($$\text {1879}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

Scots mathematician best known for his work in geometry, including non-Euclidean.

A founder, and first secretary, of the New Zealand Astronomical Society.
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1880

Alain Campbell White $($$\text {1880}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

American botanist who also composed chess problems.
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January

Frigyes Riesz $($$\text {1880}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician who developed the field of functional analysis.

Gave an elementary proof of the Mean Ergodic Theorem.

Elder brother of the mathematician Marcel Riesz.
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March

Sergei Natanovich Bernstein $($$\text {1880}$ – $\text {1968}$$)$

Russian mathematician known for contributions to partial differential equations, differential geometry, probability theory, and approximation theory
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Richard Martin Gans $($$\text {1880}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

German physicist responsible for his part in the development of Mie-Gans theory.
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May

Oskar Perron $($$\text {1880}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$

German mathematician who made numerous contributions to differential equations and partial differential equations.
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June

Oswald Veblen $($$\text {1880}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

American mathematician, geometer and topologist, whose work found application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity.

Proved the Jordan Curve Theorem in 1905.
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August

Heinrich Franz Friedrich Tietze $($$\text {1880}$ – $\text {1964}$$)$

Austrian mathematician mainly working in abstract algebra and topology.
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$\text {1881}$ – $\text {1890}$

1881

Samuel Beatty $($$\text {1881}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

Canadian mathematician, best known for Beatty sequences.
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February

Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer $($$\text {1881}$ – $\text {1966}$$)$

Dutch mathematician working in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis.

Beginning in $1912$, founded the mathematical philosophy of intuitionism.
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August

Otto Toeplitz $($$\text {1881}$ – $\text {1940}$$)$

German mathematician working in functional analysis.
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October

Lewis Fry Richardson $($$\text {1881}$ – $\text {1953}$$)$

English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist, and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting.

Also used the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them.

Noted for his pioneering work concerning fractals and a method for solving a system of linear equations known as modified Richardson iteration.
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George Waddel Snedecor $($$\text {1881}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

American mathematician and statistician who contributed to the development of analysis of variance, data analysis, experimental design, and statistical methodology.
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1882

Takeo Wada $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1944}$$)$

Japanese mathematician working in analysis and topology.

Known for introducing his technique of presenting a graphical representation of the result of a differential equation.
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February

Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1948}$$)$

Scottish mathematician most famous for his work in abstract algebra.
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Paul Koebe $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

German-born mathematician who dealt exclusively with the complex numbers.

His most important results were on the uniformization of Riemann surfaces.
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March

Victor Michael Jean-Marie Thébault $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

French mathematician best known for propounding three specific problems in geometry.

Also contributed many problems to various mathematical journals.
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Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1969}$$)$

Polish mathematician who made considerable contributions to the fields of set theory, number theory and topology, among others.

Most famous for the Sierpiński triangle.
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Emmy Noether $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$

German-born mathematician who made considerable contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics.

Most famous for Noether's Theorem which makes the fundamental connection between symmetry and various laws of conservation.

Her philosophy and outlook were fundamental in the development of ideas that led to the establishment of the field of category theory.

Daughter of Max Noether.
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April

Percy Williams Bridgman $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1961}$$)$

American physicist awarded for his work on the physics of high pressures.

Wrote extensively on the scientific method and other aspects of the philosophy of science.
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Maurice Kraitchik $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

Belgian mathematician and writer who wrote on number theory and recreational mathematics.

Proved in $1922$ that the Mersenne number $M_{257}$ is composite, contrary to the claims of Marin Mersenne.
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June

Clement Vavasor Durell $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1968}$$)$

English schoolmaster who wrote mathematical textbooks.
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July

Leonard Nelson $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1927}$$)$

German mathematician, critical philosopher, and socialist.

He devised the Grelling-Nelson Paradox in $1908$ and the related idea of autological words with Kurt Grelling.
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Konrad Hermann Theodor Knopp $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

German mathematician who worked on generalized limits and complex functions.
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August

Thomas Eric Peet $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

English Egyptologist whose contribution to mathematics was his translation of the Rhind Papyrus.
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September

Henry Maurice Sheffer $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1964}$$)$

American logician famous for proving in $1913$ that the logical NAND operator is functionally complete. (This had previously been noted by Charles Sanders Peirce in $1880$ but not published till $1933$.)
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October

Harry Schultz Vandiver $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

American mathematician known for his work in number theory.
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November

Robert Lee Moore $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

American mathematician known for his work in general topology.

Also known for the Moore method of teaching university mathematics.
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December

Yakov Isidorovich Perelman $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

Russian and Soviet science writer and author of many popular science books, including Physics for Entertainment and Mathematics Can Be Fun.
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Max Born $($$\text {1882}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

German-Jewish physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

Also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics.

Supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s.
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1883

Frederick Ernest Relton $($$\text {1883}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

English mathematician known for his books on Bessel functions and applied differential equations.
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February

Eric Temple Bell $($$\text {1883}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

Scottish mathematician now more famous for his popular work on the history of mathematics Men of Mathematics.

Did research in number theory and analysis, and (less than successfully) worked on putting umbral calculus on a sound logical footing.

Also noted (in certain circles) for writing science fiction (under the pseudonym John Taine) and poetry.
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April

Clarence Irving Lewis $($$\text {1883}$ – $\text {1964}$$)$

American philosopher logician recognized as being a leading authority on symbolic logic.

An early proponent of the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, and also referenced the logical works of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.

Did considerable work to analyze the semantic meaning of the conditional statement.

Analyzed modal logic.
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Richard Edler von Mises $($$\text {1883}$ – $\text {1953}$$)$

Mathematician and scientist of Austrian nationality who worked in the fields of statistics, probability theory and various branches of applied mathematics and physics.

Also an authority on the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
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June

James Henry Weaver $($$\text {1883}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

American mathematician who co-authored books with Robert Daniel Carmichael.
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August

Norman Herbert Anning $($$\text {1883}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

Canadian mathematician, best known for the Erdős-Anning Theorem.
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1884

Nicolaas George Wijnand Henri Beeger $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1965}$$)$

Dutch mathematician who worked on Dirichlet series.

Proved in $1922$ that $3511$ is a Wieferich prime.
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January

Arnaud Denjoy $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

French mathematician known for his contributions in harmonic analysis and differential equations.
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March

Bharati Krishna Tirthaji $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

Indian monastic who wrote a book on mental arithmetic.
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Philipp Frank $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1966}$$)$

Austrian physicist, mathematician and logical-positivist philosopher.

Member of the Vienna Circle.
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George David Birkhoff $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1944}$$)$

American mathematician best known for what is now known as the Ergodic Theorem.

The father of Garrett Birkhoff.
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April

Thomas Murray MacRobert $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

British mathematician working mainly in analysis.
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Arthur Josef Alwin Wieferich $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

German mathematician who contributed briefly to the field of number theory before concentrating on a career in teaching.
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June

Eduard Helly $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

Austrian mathematician working mainly in topology and functional analysis.

Proved special cases of the Hahn-Banach Theorem and Banach-Steinhaus Theorem, but remained unrecognised for these at the time.
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Henry Thomas Herbert Piaggio $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1967}$$)$

English mathematician best known for his text book An Elementary Treatise on Differential Equations and their Applications.
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Ruggiero Torelli $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1915}$$)$

Italian mathematician whose work was mainly in algebraic geometry and the non-rational functions of the points of a Riemann surface.
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Charles Ernest Weatherburn $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

Australian mathematician best known for his work in vector analysis.
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September

Solomon Lefschetz $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1972}$$)$

Russian-born American mathematician who did fundamental work on algebraic topology, its applications to algebraic geometry, and the theory of non-linear ordinary differential equations.
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Harvey Fletcher $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1981}$$)$

American experimental physicist who made contributions in acoustics, electrical engineering, speech, medicine, music, atomic physics, sound pictures, and education.

Worked with Robert Andrews Millikan on measuring the elementary electric charge.
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Dénes Kőnig $($$\text {1884}$ – $\text {1944}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician who was a pioneer of graph theory.

The son of Gyula Kőnig.
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1885

January

Michel Plancherel $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1967}$$)$

Swiss mathematician who worked in the areas of mathematical analysis, mathematical physics and algebra.
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April

Leonida Tonelli $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1946}$$)$

Italian mathematician, noted for creating Tonelli's Theorem.
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June

John Edensor Littlewood $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1977}$$)$

British mathematician best known for his collaborations with Godfrey Harold Hardy.
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August

Herbert Westren Turnbull $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1961}$$)$

English mathematician best known now for his writings on the history of mathematics.

Did considerably work on the theory of invariants.
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September

Wilhelm Johann Eugen Blaschke $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

Austrian differential and integral geometer.

Published one of the first books devoted to convex sets: Kreis und Kugel.

Made a thorough review of the subject with citations within the text to attribute credit in a classical area of mathematics.
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October

Niels Henrik David Bohr $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory.
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Alfréd Haar $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1933}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician who best known for his work on analysis on groups.

Introduced the Haar measure.
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Viggo Brun $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1978}$$)$

Norwegian mathematician best known for his work in number theory.
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November

Frank Hyneman Knight $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1972}$$)$

American economist whose work inspired some of the early developments in game theory.

Developed the argument which was eventually named Wardrop's First Principle (for John Glen Wardrop).
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Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl $($$\text {1885}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

German mathematician who worked in the fields of mathematical logic and mathematical physics.
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1886

Lillian Rosanoff Lieber $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1986}$$)$

American mathematician about whom (despite her time at Long Island University) few details survive.

Most famous for her work directed at T.C. Mits (The Celebrated Man In The Street). Her husband Hugh Gray Lieber often did the illustrations.

Some editions of her work are credited to Lilian R. Lieber, but most resources have her as Lillian.
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January

Soichi Kakeya $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1947}$$)$

Japanese mathematician who worked mainly in mathematical analysis

Posed the Kakeya Problem.

Solved a version of the desert crossing problem.
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George Neville Watson $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1965}$$)$

English mathematician who applied complex analysis to the theory of special functions.
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March

Kurt Grelling $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

German logician and philosopher who was a member of the Berlin Circle.
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July

Michael Fekete $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician and set theorist who worked on the transfinite diameter of a set.
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September

Paul Pierre Lévy $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$

French mathematician who was active especially in probability theory, introducing fundamental concepts such as local time, stable distributions and characteristic functions.
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November

Marcel Riesz $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1969}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician who worked on analysis, number theory and abstract algebra, among other fields.

Younger brother of the mathematician Frigyes Riesz.
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December

Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach $($$\text {1886}$ – $\text {1982}$$)$

German mathematician working mostly in analysis.
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1887

Paul Poulet $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1946}$$)$

Belgian amateur mathematician working in number theory.

Published his investigations into sociable numbers in $1918$.

Calculated the Fermat pseudoprimes to base $2$ (now called Poulet numbers) up to $50$ million in $1926$, then up to $100$ million in $1938$.

Published $43$ new multiperfect numbers in $1925$, including the first two known octo-perfect numbers.
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January

Władysław Hugo Dionizy Steinhaus $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1972}$$)$

Polish mathematician and educator who gave a notable contribution to functional analysis through the Banach-Steinhaus Theorem.
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February

Arthur Rosenthal $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1959}$$)$

German mathematician working in geometry, in particular the classification of regular polyhedra and Hilbert's axioms.

Also made contributions in analysis, including to Carathéodory's theory of measure.

With Michel Plancherel, made contributions in ergodic theory and dynamical systems.
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May

Thoralf Albert Skolem $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

Norwegian mathematician who worked mainly in the fields of mathematical logic and set theory.
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Louis Leon Thurstone $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1955}$$)$

American pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics.

Conceived the approach to measurement known as the law of comparative judgment

Well known for his contributions to factor analysis.
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June

Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

Russian mathematician who contributed significantly to several areas of pure and applied mathematics. Best known for his 5-volume textbook A Course in Higher Mathematics which was widely used.
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Ernst Hjalmar Waloddi Weibull $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1979}$$)$

Swedish engineer, scientist, and mathematician best known for giving his name to the Weibull distribution.
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August

Otton Marcin Nikodym $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

Polish mathematician best known for his work in measure theory.
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Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1961}$$)$

Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics.
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September

Frank Gray $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1969}$$)$

American physicist and researcher who made numerous innovations in television.

Best remembered for the Gray code.

Conducted pioneering research on the development of television.
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Erich Hecke $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1947}$$)$

German mathematician working mainly in functional analysis.
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December

George Pólya $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1985}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician best known nowadays for the books he wrote.
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Johann Karl August Radon $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

Austrian mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations.
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Charles Galton Darwin $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

English physicist.

Served as director of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) during the Second World War
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Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan $($$\text {1887}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$

Indian mathematician who made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions.
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1888

Alan Robson $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1956}$$)$

English schoolmaster who wrote mathematical textbooks.

A major figure in the Mathematical Association.
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January

Richard Courant $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1972}$$)$

German mathematician best known for his writings.

Made considerable contributions to the field numerical analysis.
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Louis Joel Mordell $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1972}$$)$

American-born British mathematician known for his pioneering research in number theory.
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Sydney Chapman $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

English mathematician whose most noted mathematical accomplishments were in the field of stochastic processes.

Worked out the photochemical mechanisms that give rise to the ozone layer.
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June

Zygmunt Janiszewski $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1920}$$)$

Polish mathematician whose work was mainly in topology.

Co-founded the journal Fundamenta Mathematicae but died of influenza before its first issue.
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Georges Darmois $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

French mathematician and statistician who pioneered in the theory of sufficiency, in stellar statistics, and in factor analysis.

One of the first French mathematicians to teach British mathematical statistics.
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William Richard Maximilian Hugo Threlfall $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1949}$$)$

German mathematician whose main work was in topology.

Collaborated extensively with Karl Johannes Herbert Seifert.
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September

James Waddell Alexander II $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$

American mathematician who did pioneering work in topology and knot theory.
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Aubrey John Kempner $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

English-born American mathematician, known for the Kempner function and the Kempner series.
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Stefan Mazurkiewicz $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

Polish mathematician who worked in mathematical analysis, topology and probability.
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October

Paul Isaac Bernays $($$\text {1888}$ – $\text {1977}$$)$

Swiss mathematician who worked mainly in mathematical logic and axiomatic set theory.
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1889

Jekuthiel Ginsburg $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1957}$$)$

American mathematician best known for founding Scripta Mathematica.
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January

Eric Harold Neville $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1961}$$)$

English mathematician, best known for being the one who persuaded Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England.
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Balthasar van der Pol $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1959}$$)$

Dutch physicist best known for van der Pol's equation and the van der Pol oscillator.
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February

Hyman Levy $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$

Scottish philosopher, mathematician and political activist.

Aeronautics researcher at the National Physical Laboratory.

Published papers and books on mathematical applications pertaining to aeronautics.

Wrote about differential equations and probability.
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March

William Marshall Smart $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$

Scottish astronomer who authored the famous Textbook on Spherical Astronomy.
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April

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
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August

Léon Nicolas Brillouin $($$\text {1889}$ – $\text {1969}$$)$

French physicist who made contributions to quantum mechanics, radio wave propagation in the atmosphere, solid state physics, and information theory.
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1890

February

Ronald Aylmer Fisher $($$\text {1890}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

English statistician, evolutionary biologist, mathematician, geneticist, and eugenicist.

Pioneered the technique of analysis of variance.
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October

Jakob Nielsen $($$\text {1890}$ – $\text {1959}$$)$

Danish mathematician known for his work on automorphisms of surfaces.
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$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1900}$

1891

Vera Sanford $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$

American mathematician and historian.
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January

Abram Samoilovitch Besicovitch $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

Ukrainian mathematician who worked mainly on combinatorial methods and questions in real analysis.

Solved the Kakeya problem in $1928$.
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February

Abraham Halevi Fraenkel $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1965}$$)$

German-born Israeli Hungarian mathematician best known for his work on axiomatic set theory.

He improved Ernst Zermelo's axiomatic system, and out of that work came the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms.

He also wrote on topics in the history of mathematics.
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April

Harold Jeffreys $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1989}$$)$

English mathematician, statistician, geophysicist, and astronomer.

Introduced the concept of the Bayes' factor.
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May

Louis Melville Milne-Thomson $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

English applied mathematician who wrote several classic textbooks on applied mathematics.

Developed several mathematical tables.
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Rudolf Carnap $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter.
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September

Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1983}$$)$

One of the creators of the field of analytic number theory.
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William Frederick Friedman $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1969}$$)$

American cryptographer instrumental in breaking Japan's PURPLE cipher before America's entrance into World War II.
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October

Rodion Osievich Kuzmin $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1949}$$)$

Russian mathematician, known for his works in number theory and analysis.
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November

Edward Lindsay Ince $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1941}$$)$

English mathematician who worked mainly in the field of differential equations.
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December

Hubert Phillips $($$\text {1891}$ – $\text {1964}$$)$

British economist, journalist, broadcaster, bridge player and organiser, composer of puzzles and quizzes, and the author of some 70 books.
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1892

A.A. Krishnaswami Ayyangar $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1953}$$)$

Indian mathematician who wrote on the Chakravala method.
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January

Carlo Emilio Bonferroni $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

Italian mathematician who worked on probability theory.
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March

Lucien Lévy $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1965}$$)$

French radio engineer and radio receiver manufacturer who invented the superheterodyne method of amplifying radio signals.
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Harold Calvin Marston Morse $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1977}$$)$

American mathematician best known for his work on the calculus of variations in the large.

Introduced the technique of differential topology now known as Morse theory.
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Stefan Banach $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1945}$$)$

Polish mathematician who founded the modern field of functional analysis.

Most famous for his collaborative paper with Alfred Tarski in 1924, in which the Banach-Tarski Paradox was raised.

This demonstrated that a contra-intuitive truth could be deduced from the ZFC axioms of set theory, specifically, by assuming the truth of the Axiom of Choice.

Impassioned controversy rages to this day.
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May

George Paget Thomson $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$

English physicist known for his discovery of the wave properties of the electron by electron diffraction.
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July

Arnold Walfisz $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

Polish mathematician who worked in analytic number theory.

Founded the mathematical journal Acta Arithmetica with Salomon Lubelski.
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Herman Lyle Smith $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1950}$$)$

American mathematician who worked in the field of set theory.
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Tage Gills Torsten Carleman $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1949}$$)$

Swedish mathematician whose main work was in analysis and applied mathematics.
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August

Li Yan $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

Chinese mathematician and historian of mathematics.
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September

Frank Wilcoxon $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1965}$$)$

American chemist and statistician, known for the development of several statistical tests.
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Arthur Holly Compton $($$\text {1892}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

American physicist best known for his discovery of the Compton effect.
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1893

February

Cornelius Lanczos $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician and physicist who worked on relativity and mathematical physics.

Invented what is now called the Fast Fourier Transform.
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Gaston Maurice Julia $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1978}$$)$

French mathematician who devised the formula for the Julia Set.

His works were popularised by Benoit B. Mandelbrot.
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May

Bronisław Knaster $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1980}$$)$

Polish mathematician best known for his discovery, in 1922, of the so-called hereditarily indecomposable continuum, otherwise known as the pseudo-arc, and the Knaster continuum, otherwise known as the buckethandle continuum.
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June

Eduard Čech $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

Czech mathematician whose research interests included projective differential geometry and topology.

Best known for the Stone-Čech Compactification Theory, with Marshall Harvey Stone.
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July

Bernard Hague $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1960}$$)$

British professor of engineering mathematics.
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August

Leslie John Comrie $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1950}$$)$

New Zealand mathematician and astronomer who was a pioneer in the field of mechanical computation.

Produced two editions of Barlow's Tables, making significant extensions and enhancements.

Computerised the British football pools.
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September

Wilfrid Norman Bailey $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1961}$$)$

British mathematician who worked on the theory of basic hypergeometric series.
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Carl Harald Cramér $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1985}$$)$

Swedish mathematician, actuary, and statistician, specializing in mathematical statistics and probabilistic number theory.
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Alexander Markowich Ostrowski $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1986}$$)$

Ukrainian mathematician who contributed towards the fields of determinants, linear algebra, algebraic equations, multivariate algebra, formal algebra, number theory, geometry, topology, convergence, theory of real functions, differential equations, differential transformations, theory of complex functions, conformal mappings, numerical analysis and others.
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Hilda Geiringer von Mises $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

Austrian mathematician best known for her work in applied mathematics.
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October

Leigh Mercer $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1977}$$)$

British recreational mathematician and wordplay expert best known for coining the palindrome: A man, a plan, a canal -- Panama!

Also the inventor of several limericks.
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Kurt Werner Friedrich Reidemeister $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$

German mathematician whose interests were mainly in combinatorial group theory, combinatorial topology, geometric group theory, and the foundations of geometry.

Also a pioneer of knot theory.
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William Leonard Ferrar $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1990}$$)$

English mathematician who focused on interpolation theory and number theory.
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November

André Bloch $($$\text {1893}$ – $\text {1948}$$)$

French mathematician who is best remembered for his fundamental contribution to complex analysis.
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1894

February

Hendrik Anthony Kramers $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1952}$$)$

Dutch physicist who worked with Niels Bohr to understand how electromagnetic waves interact with matter.
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April

Jerzy Neyman $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1981}$$)$

Polish mathematician and statistician who first introduced the modern concept of a confidence interval into statistical hypothesis testing.

Co-revised Ronald Aylmer Fisher's null hypothesis testing (in collaboration with Egon Sharpe Pearson).
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June

Carl Einar Hille $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1980}$$)$

American mathematician best known for the books he authored or coauthored.
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July

Roland Percival Sprague $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1967}$$)$

German mathematician, known for the Sprague-Grundy Theorem and for being the first mathematician to find a perfect squared square.
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Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1966}$$)$

Belgian Catholic priest, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics.

The first to hypothesise the Big Bang theory.
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Aleksandr Yakovlevich Khinchin $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1959}$$)$

Russian mathematician who was an important figure in the field of probability theory.
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September

Dirk Jan Struik $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {2000}$$)$

Dutch mathematician, historian of mathematics and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the United States.
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November

Heinz Hopf $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$

German mathematician who worked on the fields of topology and geometry.
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Norbert Wiener $($$\text {1894}$ – $\text {1964}$$)$

American mathematician who worked mainly in computer science, stochastic processes and cybernetics.
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1895

January

Gábor Szegő $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1985}$$)$

Hungarian mathematician best known nowadays for his collaborations with George Pólya.
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April

Alexander Craig Aitken $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1967}$$)$

New Zealander mathematician known for his work in statistics, algebra and numerical analysis.

Worked at Bletchley Park during World War II on the Enigma code.
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May

Júlio César de Mello e Souza $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

Brazilian mathematics professor who became famous his works on recreational mathematics, in particular O Homem que Calculava (The Man Who Counted), written under the name Malba Tahan.
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June

Charles Paine Winsor $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1951}$$)$

American engineer, physiologist and biostatistician.
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July

Trygve Nagell $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1988}$$)$

Norwegian mathematician known for his work on Diophantine equations.
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August

Egon Sharpe Pearson $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1980}$$)$

English statistician best known for development of the Neyman-Pearson lemma of statistical hypothesis testing.
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Henry Roy Brahana $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1972}$$)$

American mathematician specializing in metabelian groups and related geometric structures.

Also known for his contributions towards solution of the Four Color Theorem.
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September

Joseph Leonard Walsh $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

American mathematician who worked mainly in the field of analysis.
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Harold Hotelling $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist.

Developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.
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December

Lancelot Thomas Hogben $($$\text {1895}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$

British experimental zoologist and medical statistician who wrote popular books on science, mathematics and language in his later career.
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1896

John Perry Ballantine $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

American mathematician best known for his work on improvements to classroom calculation techniques.

Inventor of the table slide rule.
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Aimé Ferrier $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1975}$$)$

French mathematician who discovered in $1951$ that $\dfrac {2^{148} + 1} {17}$ is prime, using a manual desk calculator.

This is now sometimes referred to as Ferrier's prime.
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Lawrence Murray Graves $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

American mathematician and author of textbooks.
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February

Kazimierz Kuratowski $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1980}$$)$

Polish mathematician whose work was mainly in topology and metric spaces.

Pioneered, with Alfred Tarski and Wacław Franciszek Sierpiński, the theory of Polish spaces.
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Semen Samsonovich Kovner $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

Russian mathematician working in analysis.
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March

Wilhelm Friedrich Ackermann $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

German mathematician, best known for the Ackermann function.
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May

Rolf Maximilian Sievert $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1966}$$)$

Swedish medical physicist whose major contribution was in the study of the biological effects of ionizing radiation.
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Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandrov $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1982}$$)$

Russian mathematician who made considerable contributions in the fields of set theory and topology.

The first to introduce the concept of a kernel of a homomorphism.
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November

Raymond Louis Wilder $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1982}$$)$

American mathematician best known for his writing on the subject of the philosophy of mathematics.
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Ernst Paul Heinz Prüfer $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1934}$$)$

German mathematician who worked on abelian groups, algebraic numbers, knot theory and Sturm-Liouville theory.

Provided an ingenious proof of Cayley's Formula.
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Bertram Martin Wilson $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1935}$$)$

English mathematician, remembered primarily as a co-editor, along with G.H. Hardy and P.V. Seshu Aiyar, of the Collected Papers of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
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December

Carl Ludwig Siegel $($$\text {1896}$ – $\text {1981}$$)$

German mathematician specialising in analytic number theory.
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1897

Edgar Giraldus Phillips $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1969}$$)$

British mathematician known for his textbooks.
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January

Valery Ivanovich Glivenko $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1940}$$)$

Ukrainian mathematician who worked in foundations of mathematics, real analysis, probability theory, and mathematical statistics
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February

Gertrude Blanch $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1996}$$)$

Polish-born American mathematician who did pioneering work in numerical analysis and computation.
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Emil Leon Post $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1954}$$)$

Polish-born American mathematician and logician.

Best known for his work in the field of computability theory.
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Lincoln La Paz $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1985}$$)$

American mathematician and pioneer in the field of meteorics.

During World War II, served as research mathematician at the New Mexico Proving Grounds.
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March

Charles Fox $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1977}$$)$

English mathematician who introduced the Fox $H$-Function.
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Douglas Rayner Hartree $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1958}$$)$

English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree-Fock equations of atomic physics.

Constructed a differential analyser using Meccano.
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July

Jesse Douglas $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1965}$$)$

American mathematician best known for his general solution to Plateau's Problem.
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October

Edwin James George Pitman $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1993}$$)$

Australian mathematician who made significant contributions to statistics and probability theory.
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December

Vojtěch Jarník $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

Czech mathematician who worked mainly in number theory and analysis.

Also produced some results in lattice theory and graph theory.
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Stanisław Saks $($$\text {1897}$ – $\text {1942}$$)$

Polish mathematician and university tutor, known primarily for an extensive monograph on the theory of integrals and his works on measure theory.
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1898

Arnold Noah Lowan $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

American mathematician who was a leader in the field of operations research.
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February

Pavel Samuilovich Urysohn $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1924}$$)$

Ukrainian mathematician mainly working in analysis and topology.

Introduced the concept of compactness with Pavel Alexandrov in 1923.

Drowned in rough seas while swimming off the coast of France.
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Charles Wilderman Trigg $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1989}$$)$

American engineer, mathematician and educator.

Best known nowadays for his work in the field of recreational mathematics.
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Gregor Wentzel $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1978}$$)$

German physicist best known for development of quantum mechanics
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March

Emil Artin $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1962}$$)$

Austrian-American mathematician mainly working in abstract algebra and topology.
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David Vernon Widder $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1990}$$)$

American mathematician mainly working in analyis.

He was highly regarded for his teaching abilities.

The author of the textbook Advanced Calculus.
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April

Hellmuth Kneser $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1973}$$)$

German mathematician, who made notable contributions to group theory and topology.

Derived the theorem on the existence of a prime decomposition for $3$-manifolds.

Originated the concept of a normal surface.
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May

Arend Heyting $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1980}$$)$

Dutch mathematician and logician of the Intuitionist school.
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June

Arthur Herbert Copeland $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1970}$$)$

American mathematician whose main interest was in the foundations of probability.

Worked with Paul Erdős on the Copeland-Erdős constant.
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August

Helmut Hasse $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1979}$$)$

German mathematician who worked mainly in algebraic number theory and class field theory.
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October

Philip Franklin $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1965}$$)$

American mathematician and professor whose work was primarily focused in analysis.

Also famous for his work on the Four Color Theorem.
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Karl Menninger $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

German teacher of and writer about mathematics.
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November

Raphaël Salem $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

Greek mathematician after whom are named the Salem numbers and Salem-Spencer sets.

Also worked on Fourier series.
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December

Joseph Oscar Irwin $($$\text {1898}$ – $\text {1982}$$)$

British statistician who advanced the use of statistical methods in biological assay and other fields of laboratory medicine.
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1899

Stanley Skewes $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1988}$$)$

South African mathematician, best known for his discovery of the Skewes' number in $1933$.

One of John Edensor Littlewood's students at Cambridge University.
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January

Szolem Mandelbrojt $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1983}$$)$

Polish-French mathematician who specialized in mathematical analysis.

Co-founder of the Bourbaki group in $1934$.
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February

Chester Ittner Bliss $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1979}$$)$

American biologist best known for his contributions to statistics.

Pioneered the concept of probit analysis.
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Wolfgang Gröbner $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1980}$$)$

Austrian mathematician best known for the Gröbner Basis, used for computations in algebraic geometry.
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April

Oscar Zariski $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1986}$$)$

Russian-born mathematician, highly influential in the fields of algebraic geometry and topology.
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May

Joseph Berkson $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1982}$$)$

American physicist, physician and statistician.

Best known for identifying a source of bias in observational studies caused by selection effects known as Berkson's paradox.
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Otto Eduard Neugebauer $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1990}$$)$

Austrian American mathematician and historian of science best known for his research on the history of astronomy and the other exact sciences in antiquity and into the Middle Ages.

By studying clay tablets, he discovered that the ancient Babylonians knew much more about mathematics and astronomy than had been previously realized.
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June

Edward Charles Titchmarsh $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1963}$$)$

British mathematician known for his work in analytic number theory, Fourier analysis and other parts of mathematical analysis.
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August

Salomon Bochner $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1982}$$)$

Austrian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis, probability theory and differential geometry.
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Wolfgang Krull $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$

Made significant contributions to many areas of commutative algebra.

Much of his work was influenced by Felix Klein and Emmy Noether.
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September

Juliusz Paweł Schauder $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1943}$$)$

Polish mathematician known for his work in functional analysis, partial differential equations and mathematical physics.
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October

Øystein Ore $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1968}$$)$

Norwegian mathematician whose work was mainly in graph theory, although also known for his work in ring theory and Galois theory.

One of the early founders of lattice theory.

Also known for writing and editing several books, including a few on various aspects of the history of mathematics.
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December

Ruel Vance Churchill $($$\text {1899}$ – $\text {1987}$$)$

American mathematician best known for his textbooks.
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1900

Patrick Holt Leslie $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1974}$$)$

Scottish physiologist and statistician who introduced the concept of the Leslie model.
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January

Bernard Osgood Koopman $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1981}$$)$

French-born American mathematician, known for his work in ergodic theory, the foundations of probability, statistical theory and operations research.
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February

John Charles Burkill $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1983}$$)$

British mathematician whose main work was in analysis.

Also renowned for the quality of his teaching books.
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Quinn Michael McNemar $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1986}$$)$

American psychologist and statistician known for his work on IQ tests.

Also known for McNemar's test, the statistical test he introduced in $1947$.
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April

Albert Edward Ingham $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1967}$$)$

British mathematician best known for his work in analytic number theory.
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William John Youden $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1971}$$)$

Australian-born American statistician who formulated new statistical techniques in statistical analysis and in design of experiments.
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Wolfgang Ernst Pauli $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1958}$$)$

Austrian-born Swiss and American theoretical physicist.

One of the pioneers of quantum physics.
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September

Haskell Brooks Curry $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1982}$$)$

American mathematician and logician, best known for his work in combinatory logic and for Curry's Paradox.
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October

Nikolai Vasilyevich Smirnov $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1966}$$)$

Russian mathematician noted for his work in various fields including probability theory and statistics.
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November

Viktor Vladimirovich Nemytskii $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1967}$$)$

Soviet mathematician who introduced Nemytskii operators and the Niemytzki plane.
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December

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1995}$$)$

British scientist and scholar of Chinese history who is best known for writing on the history of Chinese science, technology and mathematics.
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John Clarke Slater $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1976}$$)$

American physicist who made major contributions to the theory of the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and solids.
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Antoni Szczepan Zygmund $($$\text {1900}$ – $\text {1992}$$)$

Polish-born American mathematician famous for his work on trigonometrical series.
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