20 TH

CENTURY
■The 20th century continued the trend
th
of the 19 towards increasing
generalization and abstraction in
mathematics, in which the notion of
axioms as “self-evident truths” was
largely discarded in favour of an
emphasis on such logical concepts as
consistency and completeness.
Fields of Mathematics
■ It also saw mathematics become major
profession, involving thousands of new Ph.D.s
each year and jobs in both teaching and
industry, and the development of hundreds of
specialized areas and fields of study, such as
group theory, functional analysis, singularity
theory, catastrophe theory, chaos theory,
model theory, category theory, game theory,
complexity theory and many more.
 HARDY and RAMANUJAN
■ Were just two of the great mathematicians of the early 20th
century who applied themselves in earnest to solving
problems of the previous century, such as the Riemann
hypothesis.
■ Hardy is credited with reforming British mathematics,
which had sunk to something of a low ebb at that time.
■ Ramanujan proved himself to be one of the most brilliant (if
somewhat undisciplined and unstable) minds of the century.
 JOHANN GUSTAV
HERMES-(19040
■ He completed his construction of a regular
16
polygon with 65,537 sides (2 + 1), using
just a compass and straight edge as Euclid
would have done, a feat that took him over
ten years.
■ The early 20th century also saw the beginnings
of the rise of the field of mathematical logic,
building on the earlier advances of Gottlob
Frege, which came to fruition in the hands of
Guiseppe Peano, L.E.J. Brouwer, David
Hilbert and particularly, Bertrand Russell and
A.N. Whitehead, whose monumental joint
work the “Pricipia Mathematica” was so
influential in mathematical and philosophical
logicism.
■The century began with a historic
convention at the Sarbonne in Paris in
the summer of 1900 which is largely
remembered for a lecture by the young
German mathematician David Hilbert in
which he set out what he saw as the 23
greatest unsolved mathematical
problems of the day.
 HILBERT
■ A brilliant mathematician, responsible for several
theorems and some entirely new mathematical
concepts, as well as overseeing the development of
what amounted to a whole new style of abstract
mathematical thinking.
■ He was unfailingly optimistic about the future of
mathematics, famously declaring in 1930 radio
interview “We must know. We will know!”, and was a
well-loved leader of the mathematical community
during the first part of the century.
 KURT GODEL
■ He was soon to put some very severe
constraints on what could and could not be
solved, and turned mathematics on its head
with famous incompleteness theorem, which
proved the unthinkable- that there could be
solutions to mathematical problems which
were true but which could never be proved.
 ALAN TURNING
■ Best known for his war-time work in breaking the German
enigma code, spent his pre-war years trying to clarify and
simplify Godel’s rather abstract proof.
■ His method led to some conclusions that were perhaps
even more devastating than Godel’s.
■ His work also led to the development of computers and the
first considerations of such concepts as artificial
intelligence.
■ With the gradual and wilful destruction of
mathematics community of German and
Austria by anti-Jewish Nazi regime in the
1930 and 1940s, the focus of world
mathematics moved to America, particularly
the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton,
which attempted to reproduce the collegiate
atmosphere of the old European universities
in rural New Jersey.
 EMMY NOETHER
■ She was also forced out of Germany by the Nazi
regime, was considered by many (including Albert
Einstein) to be the most important woman in the
history of mathematics.
■ Her work in the 1920’s and 1930’s changed the
face of abstract algebra, and she made important
contributions in the field of algebraic invariants,
commutative rings, number fields, non-commutative
algebra, and hypercomplex numbers.
JOHN VON NEUMAN
■ Considered one of the foremost mathematicians in
modern history, another mathematical child prodigy
who went on to make majors contributions to a vast
range of fields.
■ He is remembered as a pioneer of game theory, and
particularly for his design model for a stored-
program digital computer that uses a processing
unit.
■He is particularly remembered as a pioneer
for his design model for a stored-program
digital computer that uses a processing unit
and a separate storage structure to hold both
instructions and data, a general architecture
that most electronic computers follow even
today.
Von Neumann’s computer
architecture design
CLAUDE SHANNON
■ Known as the father of information theory.
■ His early work on Boolean algebra and binary
arithmetic resulted in his foundation of digital
circuit design in 1937 and a more robust exposition
of communication and information theory in 1948.
■ He also made an important contributions in
cryptography, natural language processing and
sampling theory.
 ANDREY KOLMOGOROV
■ He was credited with laying the modern axiomatic
foundations of probability theory in the 1930’s.
■ He established a reputation as the world’s leading
expert in this field.
■ He also made important contributions to the field of
topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical
mechanics, algorithmic information theory and
computational complexity.
 ANDRE WEIL
■ Refugee from the war in Europe.
■ His theorems, which allowed connections to be made
between number theory, algebra, geometry and topology,
are considered among the greatest achievements of modern
mathematics.
■ He was also responsible for setting up a group of French
mathematicians who under the secret nom-de-plume of
Nicholas Bourbaki, wrote many influential books on the
mathematics of the 20th century.
ALEXANDER GROTHENDIECK
■ He was a structuralist in a new way, thus allowing new
solutions in number theory, geometry, even in fundamental
physics.
■ His “theory of schemes” allowed certain of Weil’s number
theory conjectures to be solved , and his “theory of topoi” is
highly relevant to mathematical logic.
■ He gave an algebraic proof of the Riemann-Roch theorem,
and provided an algebraic definition of the fundamental
group of a curve.
■ He is considered by some to be one of the dominant figures
of the whole of 20th Century mathematics.
 PAUL ERDOS
■ He is prolific and famously Hungarian
mathematician worked with hundreds of different
collaborators on problems in combinatorics, gaps
theory, number theory, classical analysis,
approximation theory, set theory, and probability
theory.
■ As a humorous tribute, an “Erdos number” is given
to mathematicians according to their collaborative
proximity to him.
■The field of complex dynamics
(which is defined by the iteration of
functions on complex number spaces)
was developed by two Frenchmen,
Pierre Fatou and Goston Julia, early
in the 20th Century.
 MANDELBORT BENOIT
■ He coined the term fractal, and who became
known as the father of fractal geometry.
■ The Mandelbort set involves repeated
iterations of complex quadratic polynomial
equations of the form 𝑧𝑛2 + c, (where z is a
number in the complex plane of the form
x+iy).
Example of Fractals
 PAUL COHEN
■ His work rocked the mathematical world in 1960’s,
he proved that Cantor’s continuum hypothesis about
the possible sizes of infinite sets could be both true
AND not true, and that were effectively two
completely separate but valid mathematical worlds,
one in which the continuum hypothesis was true and
one where it was not.
 YURI MATIYASEVICH
■ He proved that Hilbert’s tenth problem was
impossible, i.e. that there is no general method for
determining when polynomial equations have a
solution in whole numbers
■ Mateyasevich built on decades of work by the
American mathematician Julia Robinson, in a great
show of internationalism at the height of the Cold
War.
 EDWARD LORENZ
■ Pioneer of chaos theory. Chaos theory tells us
that some system may have roughly predictable
behavior but fundamentally unpredictable in
details.
■ He also discovered that small changes in initial
conditions can produce large changes in long-
term outcome, he described it by the term
“butterfly effect”.
FOUR COLOUR THEOREM
■ The first major theorem to be proved using computer.
■ Proposed in 1852 by Francis Guthie.
■ Proof was given by Alfred Kempe in 1879 but Percy
Heawood incorrect it in 1890.
■ 1976 Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. They consumed
1,200 hours of computer time to examine around 1,500
configurations.
Example of Four-coluor map
 1970’s
■During this time ORIGAMI had been
recognized as a serious mathematical
method, it is more powerful than
Euclidean geometry.
 1936
■ Margherita Piazzola Beloch had shown how a
length of paper could be folded to give the cube
root of its length.
■ But 1980 an origami method was used to solve the
“doubling the cube” problem which had defeated
ancient Greek geometers.
■ 1986 when problem in origami followed which is
the equally intractable “trisecting the angle”.
 KAZOU HAGA
■An Japanese origami expert.
■In which his name has at least three
mathematical theorems.
■And his unconventional folding
techniques have demonstrated many
unexpected geometrical results.
 ANDREW WILES

■A British mathematician who

proved Fermat’s Last Theorem
for ALL numbers in 1995(350
years).
 GRIGORI MAN
■He proved the Poincare Conjecture, one
of the great conjecture to be proved. It was
solved in 2002(over 100 years).
■Eccentric and reclusive Russian
mathematician.
JOHN HORTON CONWAY
■ H e established the rules for the so-called
“Game of Life” in 1970, an example of a
“cellular automaton”.
■ He also came up with some wonderful-
sounding concepts like surreal numbers, as
well as mathematical games such as Sprouts,
Philosopher’s Football and the Soma Cube.
■Other mathematics-based recreational
puzzles became even more popular:
Rubik’s Cube (1974)
Soduko (1980)
19th century(Tangrams (1817), Fifteen
puzzle (1879).
■Computers continue to aid in the
identification of phenomena such as
Merrsenne prime numbers.
■1952, an computer known as SWAC
indentified 2 257 −1 as the 13th Mersenne
prime number, the first new one to be found
in 75 years, before going on to identify
several more even larger.
■With the advent of the Internet in the
1990s, the Great Internet Mersenne
Prime Search (GIMPS), a
collaborative project of volunteers
who use freely available computer
software to search for Mersenne
primes, led to another leap in the
discovery rate.
■The search also continues for
ever more accurate computer
approximations for the irrational
numbers 𝜋, with the current
record standing at over 5 trillion
decimal places.
Thank you for
listening and
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