If you ask about general public, then my answer was Nash. I think the only mathematicians of the last one hundred years who could be named by the general public are him (because of the movie) and Turing (to a lesser extent, but I personally have a couple of fiction books that mention his name - mostly related to his work on cryptography). Helger On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Thane Plambeck wrote:
I've observed the question "Please name a famous living mathematician" to meet with a blank stare pretty much 100% of the time. I'd be interested if anyone has had a different experience.
Physicists have much better PR.
Gratuitous cartoon: http://math.berkeley.edu/~ajt/Images/Dijkgraaf.png
Thane Plambeck http://www.plambeck.org/ehome.htm
Henry Baker wrote:
Dear Dan, et al:
I was trying to find someone alive, as I wanted to find someone with the credibility to influence non-mathematicians, in much the same way that Einstein helped convince Roosevelt & others re the atom bomb.
Sorry about the confusion.
At 09:35 AM 3/2/2006, dasimov@earthlink.net wrote:
Henry writes:
<< Does anyone on this list have a suggestion of who is the most influential mathematician today? I'm looking for someone of the stature of Hilbert; i.e., someone whom most people inside & outside of mathematics would acknowledge as being influential.
Of course, this presumes that anyone outside of mathematics knows or cares about mathematicians! . . . As you suggest, there is little overlap between the most influential mathematicians and the ones most known to the general population.
So it may be necessary to narrow down what you're asking for some more.
You said most influential *today*, but not that the mathematician need be alive today. I'm not sure what you meant regarding this.
Shiing-Shen Chern, the differential geometer (1911-2004) is said to be well-known to the general population of China. Cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern>.
Martin Gardner (mostly self-taught in math) and Ian Stewart are widely known as popularizers of math; many mathematicians attribute their choice of profession to Gardner's columns in Sci. Am.
Within math per se, I think of John Milnor and Jean-Pierre Serre as probably the most influential mathematicians alive today. (I'd pick Milnor over Serre, because Milnor's scope is probably wider and he's written more math texts, all of which are gems of exposition, and accessible survey articles.)
Excluding Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Al-Khwarizmi for being in different categories, I'd say that Carl Friedrich Gauss is the clear winner, if the question is which mathematician living or dead, has had the most impact on modern civilization AND within math per se. Cf. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_named_after_Carl_Friedrich_Gauss> for evidence of this. (Full disclosure: I would've said Gauss anyway, but recently learned
from the Mathematics Genealogy Project that Gauss is a direct mathematical ancestor
of mine, i.e., via a sequence of thesis advisors.)
--Dan
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