Mathematician:Mathematicians/Sorted By Birth/1951 + 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
$\text {1951}$ – $\text {1960}$
1951
Stanley Wagon $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
Canadian-American economist, the author of multiple books on number theory, geometry, and computational mathematics.
Also known for his snow sculptures.
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Lawrence Clinton Washington $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
American mathematician specializing in number theory.
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January
George C. Casella $($$\text {1951}$ – $\text {2012}$$)$
American statistician best known for his contributions to Monte Carlo methods, model selection and genomic analysis.
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Steven Howard Weintraub $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
American mathematician specializing in algebraic geometry, algebra und differential topology.
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February
Steven George Krantz $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
American mathematician best known for his writing and teaching.
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March
Roger Bruce Myerson $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
American economist and political scientist.
Also active in the fields of game theory and mechanism design.
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April
Ariel Rubinstein $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
Israeli mathematician Israeli economist who works in Economic Theory, Game Theory and Bounded Rationality.
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Michael Hartley Freedman $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
American mathematician best known for his work on the $4$-dimensional Generalized Poincaré Conjecture.
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May
Jonathan Michael Borwein $($$\text {1951}$ – $\text {2016}$$)$
Scottish mathematician of varied accomplishments.
A public advocate of experimental mathematics, with David Harold Bailey.
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August
Roger Lee Berger $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
American statistician best known as the co-author of Statistical Inference with George C. Casella.
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Edward Witten $($$\text {b. 1951}$$)$
American theoretical physicist and professor of mathematical physics.
Researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics.
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1952
Galen John Strawson $($$\text {b. 1952}$$)$
British analytic philosopher and literary critic working mainly on philosophy of mind and metaphysics, including free will, panpsychism, the mind-body problem, and the self.
Also writes on John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.
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January
Kenneth John Falconer $($$\text {b. 1952}$$)$
English mathematician working in mathematical analysis and in particular on fractal geometry.
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June
Robert Scott Rumely $($$\text {b. 1952}$$)$
American professor of mathematics specializing in number theory and arithmetic geometry.
He is one of the inventors of the Adleman-Pomerance-Rumely Primality Test.
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July
Adi Shamir $($$\text {b. 1952}$$)$
Israeli cryptographer and software engineer, best known for his involvement in the creation of the RSA algorithm.
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November
Neal Lamar Carothers $($$\text {1952}$ – $\text {2018}$$)$
American researcher and professor of mathematics.
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1953
Frits Beukers $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
Dutch mathematician, who works on number theory and hypergeometric functions.
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March
Dietmar Arno Salamon $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
German mathematician.
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April
Andrew John Wiles $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
English mathematician famous for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, which he completed in 1994.
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May
Peter Benjamin Borwein $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
Scottish mathematician best known for his contribution towards the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe Algorithm.
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David Elieser Deutsch $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
Israeli-born British physicist who pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine.
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August
Jean Tirole $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
French professor of economics who focuses on industrial organization, game theory, banking and finance, and economics and psychology.
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November
Charles Eric Leiserson $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
American computer scientist, specializing in the theory of parallel computing and distributed computing.
Best known as the co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, along with Thomas H. Cormen, Ronald L. Rivest and Cliff Stein.
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Glenn H. Stevens $($$\text {b. 1953}$$)$
American mathematician and educator, whose research specialties are number theory, automorphic forms, and arithmetic geometry.
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1954
David Steven Dummit $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
American mathematician best known for his text books.
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Christopher S. Mellish $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
English mathematician working in the field of computer science.
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Joseph Oesterlé $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
French mathematician working in number theory.
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Oren Patashnik $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
American computer scientist best known for co-authoring Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science with Ronald L. Graham and Donald E. Knuth.
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January
Michèle Audin $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
French mathematician working in geometry.
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David Charles Ullrich $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
American mathematician best known for his text books.
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February
Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
Ukrainian mathematician working on connecting algebraic geometry over finite fields with number theory, especially the theory of automorphic forms, through the notions of elliptic module and the theory of the geometric Langlands correspondence.
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July
Gerd Faltings $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
German mathematician known for his work in arithmetic algebraic geometry.
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August
James Gleick $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
American author and journalist known for his books about the history of science.
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Andrew Pressley $($$\text {b. 1954}$$)$
Former professor of mathematics at King’s College London, UK.
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1955
Brian Clegg $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
English science writer.
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Michael Keith $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
American mathematician and software engineer, best known in the mathematical community for his work in the field of recreational mathematics.
Also known as the author of works of constrained writing.
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David Knudsen Levine $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
American economist working in game theory.
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Dennis Elliot Shasha $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
American professor of computer science who has worked:
- with biologists on pattern discovery for microarrays, combinatorial design, network inference, and protein docking
- with physicists, musicians, and professionals in finance on algorithms for time series.
- on database applications in untrusted environments
Also interested in database tuning as well as tree and graph matching.
Interested in puzzles and their solution techniques.
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March
Joseph Hillel Silverman $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
American mathematician whose work has been in number theory, arithmetic geometry, arithmetic dynamics and cryptography.
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April
William F. Clocksin $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
English mathematician working in the field of computer science.
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May
Preda V. Mihăilescu $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
Romanian mathematician, best known for his $2002$ proof of the 158-year-old Catalan's Conjecture, now referred to as Mihăilescu's Theorem.
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June
Yuli Eidelman $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
Israeli mathematician.
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November
David Allen Bayer $($$\text {b. 1955}$$)$
American mathematician known for his contributions in algebra and symbolic computation and for his consulting work in the movie industry.
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1956
Thomas H. Cormen $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
American mathematician and computer scientist, best known for being the co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, along with Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Cliff Stein.
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Douglas Robert Stinson $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
Canadian mathematician and cryptographer.
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March
Arjen Klaas Lenstra $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
Dutch mathematician active in cryptography and computational number theory, especially in areas such as integer factorization.
Co-discoverer of the Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász Lattice Basis Reduction Algorithm.
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Paul Hoffman $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
American author, science educator, food entrepreneur and occasional writer on mathematics.
Also a puzzlemaster under the pseudonym Dr. Crypton.
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June
Simon Plouffe $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
Canadian mathematician who discovered the formula for the BBP Algorithm which permits the computation of the $n$th binary digit of $\pi$.
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July
Peter M. Higgins $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
Australian mathematician specialising in algebraic semigroups.
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Eric Eleterius Coralie van Damme $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
Dutch economist known for his contributions to game theory.
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October
Colin Conrad Adams $($$\text {b. 1956}$$)$
American mathematician, humorist and prolific writer active in knot theory and topology.
Active in combating the too-common psychological condition of math anxiety.
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1957
March
Drew Fudenberg $($$\text {b. 1957}$$)$
American mathematician working on game theory, including equilibrium theory, learning in games, and evolutionary game theory.
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Daniel Zwillinger $($$\text {b. 1957}$$)$
American mathematician best known for his work editing the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae, 33rd ed.
.
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August
Clifford Alan Pickover $($$\text {b. 1957}$$)$
American mathematician whose main research area is fractals.
Also a prolific popular writer on several topics.
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Simon Kirwan Donaldson $($$\text {b. 1957}$$)$
English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson-Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry.
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October
Jeffrey Outlaw Shallit $($$\text {b. 1957}$$)$
American computer scientist, number theorist, and a noted critic of intelligent design.
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November
George F. Woltman $($$\text {b. 1957}$$)$
American mathematician and computer scientist who is the founder of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).
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Fernando Quadros Gouvêa $($$\text {b. 1957}$$)$
Brazilian mathematician interested in number theory and the history of mathematics.
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1958
Shyam Sunder Gupta $($$\text {c. 1958}$$)$
Indian railway engineer who has made contributions to the field of recreational mathematics.
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February
Robert Arnott Wilson $($$\text {b. 1958}$$)$
English mathematician best known for his work on classifying the maximal subgroups of finite simple groups and for the work in the Monster group.
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May
Mark Steven Manasse $($$\text {b. 1958}$$)$
American computer scientist and mathematician who works in the field of algorithmic number theory
Part of the team which factorised the $9$th Fermat number.
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June
Thomas Callister Hales $($$\text {b. 1958}$$)$
American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification.
Known for his work on the Langlands program and contribution to the proof of the fundamental lemma over the group $\map {\mathrm {Sp} } 4$
Settled the Kepler's Conjecture on the density of sphere packings and the honeycomb conjecture.
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Robert S. Gibbons $($$\text {b. 1958}$$)$
American economist, currently the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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July
Kate Bush $($$\text {b. 1958}$$)$
English musician and composer whose contribution to mathematics was to compose a piece called $\pi$ which contains (inaccurately) the first 150 or so digits of its decimal expansion.
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October
Christian Friedrich Krattenthaler $($$\text {b. 1958}$$)$
Austrian mathematician working mainly in the field of discrete mathematics with a focus on combinatorics.
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1959
Steven M. Awodey $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
American mathematician and philosopher of mathematics.
Active researcher in the areas of category theory and logic.
Has also written on the philosophy of mathematics.
One of the originators of the field of homotopy type theory.
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Mark W. Bowron $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
American mathematician working in number theory.
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Reinhard Diestel $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
German mathematician working mainly in graph theory.
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Steven R. Finch $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
American mathematician working in applied mathematics, with special attention to weather forecasting.
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Shafi Goldwasser $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
Israeli-American computer scientist.
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Joan-Vicenç Gómez i Urgellés $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
Spanish mathematician best known for being the author of several books.
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Dale A. Miller $($$\text {1959}$$)$
American research scientist working on computational logic.
Known for the so-called Millin series, which he discovered in high school.
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August
Stephen Wolfram $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
English mathematician best known for being the name behind Mathematica.
Much of his work has been in the field of cellular automata.
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September
Mark Pollicott $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
British mathematician known for his contributions to ergodic theory and dynamical systems.
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November
Jean-François Le Gall $($$\text {b. 1959}$$)$
French mathematician working in areas of probability theory such as Brownian motion, Lévy processes, superprocesses and their connections with partial differential equations, the Brownian snake, random trees, branching processes, stochastic coalescence and random planar maps.
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1960
Robert Ainsley $($$\text {b. 1960}$$)$
British mathematician best known for his Bluffers' Guides.
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Ariel T. Glenn $($$\text {b. 1960}$$)$
American mathematician and software engineer best noted for finding the Mersenne prime $M_{21 \, 701}$, alongside Landon Curt Noll, while still at high school.
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October
Landon Curt Noll $($$\text {b. 1960}$$)$
American mathematician best noted for finding the two Mersenne primes $M_{21\ 701}$ and $M_{23\ 209}$ while still at high school (the first together with Laura Ariel Nickel, now Ariel T. Glenn).
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December
Carol Jean Vorderman $($$\text {b. 1960}$$)$
British mathematically literate TV presenter best known for having presented Countdown for $26$ years.
Has intensive involvement in the British government's initiative to improve the mathematical literacy of school students. Whether you consider this as a point in her favour or against her depends on how cynically you view the government of the United Kingdom. It is worth pointing out that the website presented in her name has had a mixed reception.
A $3$rd-class degree from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge is known as a Vorderman in her honour.
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Matt Westwood $($$\text {b. 1960}$$)$
British amateur mathematician best known for the discovery of Westwood's Puzzle.
One of the more tedious practitioners of the modern tendency towards Bourbakism.
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$\text {1961}$ – $\text {1970}$
1961
Kenneth Keeler $($$\text {b. 1961}$$)$
American mathematician who passes the time between theorems writing episodes of Futurama.
The Futurama episode The Prisoner of Benda features an application of what we on $\mathsf{Pr} \infty \mathsf{fWiki}$ are going to call the Futurama Theorem.
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March
Neil James Calkin $($$\text {b. 1961}$$)$
American-born British mathematician whose interests are in combinatorial and probabilistic methods, mainly as applied to number theory.
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June
John Carlos Baez $($$\text {b. 1961}$$)$
American mathematician and physicist known for his work in spin foams in loop quantum gravity.
Also known for his writings on octonions and higher-order Clifford algebras.
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November
Terry Wiley $($$\text {b. 1961}$$)$
British writer, cartoonist and amateur mathematician.
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1962
Michael R.A. Huth $($$\text {b. 1962}$$)$
British mathematician majoring in computer science.
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Gordon F. Royle $($$\text {b. 1962}$$)$
Australian mathematician specialising in algebraic graph theory.
Involved in research into the game of Sudoku.
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March
Rajeev Motwani $($$\text {1962}$ – $\text {2009}$$)$
Indian-American professor of Computer Science whose research focused on theoretical computer science.
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April
Rafael Lahoz-Beltra $($$\text {b. 1962}$$)$
Spanish mathematician known for the invention of electronic enzyme.
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May
Richard Lawrence Taylor $($$\text {b. 1962}$$)$
British and American mathematician working in the field of number theory.
Collaborated with Andrew John Wiles on Fermat's Last Theorem.
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September
Andrew James Granville $($$\text {b. 1962}$$)$
British professor of mathematics working mainly in number theory.
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1963
October
Thomas Ward $($$\text {b. 1963}$$)$
British mathematician working in ergodic theory and dynamical systems, and its relations to number theory.
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November
William Timothy Gowers $($$\text {b. 1963}$$)$
British mathematician most famous for connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.
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1964
Roland Girgensohn $($$\text {b. 1964}$$)$
German mathematician working in number theory.
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September
Trevor Dion Wooley $($$\text {b. 1964}$$)$
British mathematician interested in analytic number theory, Diophantine equations and harmonic analysis.
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Simon Lehna Singh $($$\text {b. 1964}$$)$
British author with an educational background in particle physics who specializes in writing about mathematical and scientific topics in an accessible manner.
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1965
May
Olivier Ramaré $($$\text {b. 1965}$$)$
French mathematician working in number theory.
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August
Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy $($$\text {b. 1965}$$)$
British professor of mathematics best known for his authorship of popular mathematical works.
Also a TV presenter.
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December
Gyula Y. Katona $($$\text {b. 1965}$$)$
Hungarian mathematician working mainly in graph theory.
The son of Gyula O.H. Katona.
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Clifford Seth Stein $($$\text {b. 1965}$$)$
American computer scientist and professor of industrial engineering and operations research.
Well-known as one of the contributors to later editions of Introduction to Algorithms, along with Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson and Ronald L. Rivest .
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1966
June
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman $($$\text {b. 1966}$$)$
Russian mathematician famous for solving Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture, and hence completing the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture.
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August
Noam David Elkies $($$\text {b. 1966}$$)$
American mathematician and chess master.
With Arthur Oliver Lonsdale Atkin, extended Schoof's Algorithm to create the Schoof-Elkies-Atkin Algorithm.
Found the first known counterexample to Euler's Quartic Conjecture.
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Grzegorz Bancerek $($$\text {1966}$ – $\text {2017}$$)$
Polish mathematician who was one of the founders of the Mizar project.
For a short time before his passing, Bancerek was a tireless contributor towards sharing the work held on Mizar with $\mathsf{Pr} \infty \mathsf{fWiki}$.
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1967
Joel Armengaud $($$\text {b. 1967}$$)$
Frenchman who found the Mersenne prime $M_{1\ 398\ 269}$.
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Hjalmar Ekdal $($$\text {established c. 1967}$$)$
Hjalmar Ekdal is the name chosen by the group of $3$ professors and $5$ students at St Olaf College, Minnesota for the pseudonym of the author of the yet-to-be-written Counterexamples in Topology.
In due course, the book was published as by Lynn Arthur Steen and J. Arthur Seebach, Jr., $2$ of the professors whose efforts made the book possible.
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May
Jens Vygen $($$\text {b. 1967}$$)$
German mathematician working in combinatorial optimization and algorithmic mathematics.
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1968
1969
James Cooper Robinson $($$\text {b. 1969}$$)$
British mathematician specialising in dynamical systems.
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René L. Schilling $($$\text {b. 1969}$$)$
German mathematician mainly active in the fields of measure theory and analysis.
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Gordon Spence $($$\text {b. 1969}$$)$
British IT manager and computer hobbyist who found the Mersenne prime $M_{2\ 976\ 221}$.
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Francis Edward Su $($$\text {c. 1969}$$)$
American mathematician whose research area is combinatorics.
Particularly known for his work on fair division.
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March
Eric Wolfgang Weisstein $($$\text {b. 1969}$$)$
American mathematician best known for creating and maintaining MathWorld.
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Shinichi Mochizuki $($$\text {b. 1969}$$)$
Japanese mathematician working in number theory and arithmetic geometry.
One of the main contributors to anabelian geometry.
Inventor and developer of inter-universal Teichmüller theory.
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November
Nik Weaver $($$\text {b. 1969}$$)$
American mathematician working mainly in set theory and measure theory.
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Alexander Bellos $($$\text {b. 1969}$$)$
British mathematician best known as the author of books on mathematics.
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1970
$\text {1971}$ – $\text {1980}$
1971
Jordan Stuart Ellenberg $($$\text {b. 1971}$$)$
American mathematician working mainly within arithmetic geometry.
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January
Clara Isabel Grima Ruiz $($$\text {b. 1971}$$)$
Spanish mathematician known for her research on scutoids and for her popularization of mathematics.
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August
Ruth Elke Lawrence-Neimark $($$\text {b. 1971}$$)$
British-Israeli mathematician involved in research in knot theory and algebraic topology.
Famously a child prodigy who obtained her first-class degree at age $13$.
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1972
October
Sudipto Banerjee $($$\text {b. 1972}$$)$
Indian-American statistician best known for his work on Bayesian hierarchical modeling and inference for spatial data analysis.
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1973
March
Manfred Einsiedler $($$\text {b. 1973}$$)$
Austrian mathematician specialising in ergodic theory.
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October
Agata Smoktunowicz $($$\text {b. 1973}$$)$
Polish mathematician whose research is in abstract algebra.
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1974
May
Ben Michael Goldacre $($$\text {b. 1974}$$)$
British author, journalist, doctor and psychiatrist, who is tirelessly campaigning against bullshit in the reporting of science, particularly medical science.
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1975
January
Danica Mae McKellar $($$\text {b. 1975}$$)$
American mathematician better known as an actor.
Also known for her books aimed specifically at middle-school and high-school girls to increase their confidence in mathematics.
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July
Terence Chi-Shen Tao $($$\text {b. 1975}$$)$
Australian all-rounder widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians.
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1977
May
Maryam Mirzakhani $($$\text {1977}$ – $\text {2017}$$)$
Iranian mathematician notable for being the first female recipient of the Fields Medal.
Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry.
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1978
January
Nathaniel Read Silver $($$\text {b. 1978}$$)$
American statistician and writer who analyzes baseball and elections.
Famous for successfully calling the outcomes in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election.
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1980
October
James Grime $($$\text {b. 1980}$$)$
Publicist of mathematics and maker of YouTube videos.
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December
Matthew Thomas Parker $($$\text {b. 1980}$$)$
Australian recreational mathematician, author, comedian, YouTube personality and science communicator.
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$1981$ and on
1985
Christian Yates $($$\text {b. 1985}$$)$
British academic and author of popular science books.
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1986
Lily Serna $($$\text {b. 1986}$$)$
Australian mathematician and TV presenter also known for her work as a data analyst.
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1988
Victoria Hart $($$\text {b. 1988}$$)$
American mathematician best known for the videos she has published on YouTube under the name Vi Hart.
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1989
March
Daniel Robert Page $($$\text {b. 1989}$$)$
Canadian mathematician, computer scientist and algorithmist.
Creator of Page's Algorithm.
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2005
March
Jyotiraditya Jadhav $($$\text {b. 2005}$$)$
Indian mathematician who believes he is at the forefront of exciting discoveries in geometry and algebra.
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