20 Mathematicians That Changed The World

I though Florrence Nightingale invented the pie chart?
Fight fight fight...
A thousand Quatlous on the English woman !

The article says his importance can't be overstated... hmmm, but if can if they tell fibs.
I'm gonna tell ER on you.... (scampers off.... please miss... please miss!)
Del

I thought Betty Crocker invented the pie chart.

A slice of pecan pie.

It looks like I'll have to admit that QI disagrees with Wiki (well, if one can't blame one's sources, what are they for???!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#History

Sorry Del...

_{Psst: scamper of here and we'll have some consolatory salmon, since you were so kind as to drag me into this}

Pie charts were first used by cave dwelling ancients to mark time....

or by native Americans who constructed medicine wheels...

or by ancient astrologists....

or the Sumerians or the Babylonians or the Greeks....

All very, er, impressive....

Or, 10 mathematicians, 8 physicists and 2 engineers that changed the world through the use of mathematics.

Rene Descartes ought to be in the top 20. Among his many contributions to mathematics he invented analytical geometry and the cartesian coordinate system that led to Playfair's 'invention' of those charts. Also it seems a bit redundant to have Babbage, Lovelace, Turing and Von Neumann all there.

I think the list should have included Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi, who is responsible for a lot of what western civilization knows about mathematics and from whose name we get the word Algebra. (Yes I know that a lot of his work was based on earlier work done in India and Greece, but he made contributions of his own in addition to spreading the knowledge of mathematics.)

And how about a shout-out to Paul Erdos, the mathematician who has published more papers than any other mathematician in history.

Just noticed your are from Trantor...an asmovian imagination then ?

This is the classic reference and is well worth the read...

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by

Edward R. Tufte

What I find amazing is that even with clever tutors, clever displays, and clever teaching techniques, I find these things hard to grasp or understand or learn or even harder to remember, whereas the original inventor plucked it out of the air from nowhere and created it from nothing.

Incredible.