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This is a
list of amateur mathematicians—people whose primary vocation did not involve mathematics (or any similar discipline) yet made notable, and sometimes important, contributions to the field of mathematics. In general, they are
not listed in the
Mathematics Genealogy ProjectThe Mathematics Genealogy Project is a web-based database for the academic genealogy of mathematicians. As of September, 2010, it contained information on approximately 145,000 mathematical scientists who contribute to "research-level mathematics"...
.
- Maria Gaetana Agnesi (primary school teacher)
- Ahmes
Ahmes was an ancient Egyptian scribe who lived during the Second Intermediate Period and the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty . He wrote the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, a work of Ancient Egyptian mathematics that dates to approximately 1650 BC; he is the earliest contributor to mathematics...
(scribe)
- Robert Ammann
Robert Ammann was an amateur mathematician who made several significant and groundbreaking contributions to the theory of quasicrystals and aperiodic tilings....
(programmer and postal worker)
- John Arbuthnot
John Arbuthnot, often known simply as Dr. Arbuthnot, , was a physician, satirist and polymath in London...
(surgeon and author)
- Jean-Robert Argand
Jean-Robert Argand was a gifted amateur mathematician. In 1806, while managing a bookstore in Paris, he published the idea of geometrical interpretation of complex numbers known as the Argand diagram.-Life:...
(bookkeeper)
- Leon Bankoff
Leon Bankoff , born in New York City, New York, was an American dentist and mathematician.- Life :...
(Beverly Hills Dentist)
- Rev. Thomas Bayes
Thomas Bayes was an English mathematician and Presbyterian minister, known for having formulated a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem...
(Presbyterian minister)
- Andrew Beal
D. Andrew "Andy" Beal is a Dallas, Texas-based billionaire businessman who was born and raised in Lansing, Michigan. He made his fortune in banking and real estate and is the founder and chairman of Beal Bank and Beal Aerospace Technologies. Beal is also known for his high-stakes poker games and...
(businessman)
- Friedrich Bessel
-References:* John Frederick William Herschel, A brief notice of the life, researches, and discoveries of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, London: Barclay, 1847 -External links:...
(accountant)
- Bernard Frénicle de Bessy
Bernard Frénicle de Bessy , was a French mathematician born in Paris, who wrote numerous mathematical papers, mainly in number theory and combinatorics. He is best remembered for Des quarrez ou tables magiques, a treatise on magic squares published posthumously in 1693, in which he described all...
(Counsellor, Cour des monnaies)
- Chester Ittner Bliss
Chester Ittner Bliss was primarily a biologist, who is best known for his contributions to statistics. He was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1899 and died in 1979.-Academic qualifications:*Bachelor of Arts in Entomology from Ohio State University, 1921...
(biologist)
- Napoléon Bonaparte (general)
- George Boole
George Boole was an English mathematician and philosopher.As the inventor of Boolean logic—the basis of modern digital computer logic—Boole is regarded in hindsight as a founder of the field of computer science. Boole said,...
(primary school teacher)
- Mary Everest Boole
Mary Everest Boole was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole...
(homemaker, librarian)
- William Bourne
William Bourne was an English mathematician, innkeeper and former Royal Navy gunner who invented the first navigable submarine and wrote important navigational manuals...
(innkeeper)
- Nathaniel Bowditch
Nathaniel Bowditch was an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation. He is often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation; his book The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still carried on board every commissioned U.S...
(indentured bookkeeper)
- Achille Brocot
Achille Brocot was a French clockmaker and amateur mathematician. He is known for his discovery of the Stern–Brocot tree, a mathematical structure useful in approximating real numbers by rational numbers; this sort of approximation is an important part of the design of gear ratios for clocks...
(clockmaker)
- Harlan J. Brothers
Harlan J. Brothers is an inventor, mathematician, and musician based in Branford, Connecticut.- Life and work :In 1997, while examining the sequence of counting numbers raised to their own power , Brothers discovered some simple algebraic formulas that yielded the number 2.71828..., the universal...
(teacher, inventor, and musician)
- Jost Bürgi (clockmaker)
- Marvin Ray Burns (veteran)
- Gerolamo Cardano
Gerolamo Cardano was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer and gambler...
(medical doctor)
- D. G. Champernowne
David Gawen Champernowne was an English economist and mathematician.After academic work at Cambridge and the London School of Economics, he worked at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University...
, (college student)
- Thomas Clausen
Thomas Clausen was a Danish mathematician and astronomer....
(technical assistant)
- Sir James Cockle (judge)
- Federico Commandino
Federico Commandino was an Italian humanist and mathematician.Born in Urbino, he studied at Padua and at Ferrara, where he received his doctorate in medicine. He translated the works of ancient mathematicians and was responsible for the publication of the works of Archimedes...
(medical doctor)
- William Crabtree
William Crabtree was an astronomer, mathematician, and merchant from Broughton, then a township near Manchester, which is now part of Salford, Greater Manchester, England...
(merchant)
- Nathan Daboll
Nathan Daboll was an American teacher who wrote the mathematics textbook most commonly used in American schools in the first half of the 19th century...
(cooper)
- Felix Delastelle
Félix Marie Delastelle was a Frenchman most famous for his invention of several systems of polygraphic substitution ciphers including the bifid, trifid, and the four-square ciphers....
(bonded warehouseman)
- Martin Demaine
Martin L. Demaine is an artist and mathematician, the Angelika and Barton Weller artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
(goldsmith and glass artist)
- Humphry Ditton
Humphry Ditton was an English mathematician.-Life:Ditton was born at Salisbury. He studied theology, and was for some years a dissenting minister at Tonbridge, but on the death of his father he devoted himself to the congenial study of mathematics...
(minister)
- Harvey Dubner
Harvey Dubner is a semi-retired engineer living in New Jersey, noted for his contributions to finding large prime numbers. In 1984, he and his son Robert collaborated in developing the 'Dubner cruncher', a board which used a commercial finite impulse response filter chip to speed up dramatically...
(engineer)
- Henry Dudeney
Henry Ernest Dudeney was an English author and mathematician who specialised in logic puzzles and mathematical games. He is known as one of the country's foremost creators of puzzles...
(civil servant)
- M. C. Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher , usually referred to as M. C. Escher , was a Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints...
(graphic artist)
- Sarah Flannery
Sarah Flannery was, at sixteen years old, the winner of the 1999 Esat Young Scientist Exhibition for development of the Cayley–Purser algorithm, based on work she had done with researchers at Baltimore Technologies during a brief internship there...
(high school student)
- Reo Fortune
Reo Franklin Fortune was a New Zealand social anthropologist. Originally trained as a psychologist, Fortune was a lecturer in social anthropology at the Cambridge University, and a specialist in Melanesian language and culture. He was married to Margaret Mead, with whom he undertook field studies...
(anthropologist)
- John G.F. Francis
John G.F. Francis is an English computer scientist, who in 1961 published the QR algorithm for computing the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices, which has been named as one of the ten most important algorithms of the twentieth century. The algorithm was also proposed independently by Vera N...
(research assistant)
- Benjamin Franklin
Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...
(founding father)
- Bernard Frénicle de Bessy
Bernard Frénicle de Bessy , was a French mathematician born in Paris, who wrote numerous mathematical papers, mainly in number theory and combinatorics. He is best remembered for Des quarrez ou tables magiques, a treatise on magic squares published posthumously in 1693, in which he described all...
(counsellor)
- Gemma Frisius
Gemma Frisius , was a physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker...
(medical doctor)
- Britney Gallivan
Britney Crystal Gallivan of Pomona, California, is best known for determining the maximum number of times which paper or other materials can be folded.-Biography:...
(high school student)
- James Garfield
James Abram Garfield served as the 20th President of the United States, after completing nine consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. Garfield's accomplishments as President included a controversial resurgence of Presidential authority above Senatorial courtesy in executive...
(United States President)
- Thorold Gosset
Thorold Gosset was an English lawyer and an amateur mathematician. In mathematics, he is noted for discovering and classifying the semiregular polytopes in dimensions four and higher.According to H. S. M...
(lawyer)
- Jørgen Pedersen Gram
Jørgen Pedersen Gram was a Danish actuary and mathematician who was born in Nustrup, Duchy of Schleswig, Denmark and died in Copenhagen, Denmark....
(actuary)
- Hermann Grassmann
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath, renowned in his day as a linguist and now also admired as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, general scholar, and publisher...
(school teacher)
- John Graunt
John Graunt was one of the first demographers, though by profession he was a haberdasher. Born in London, the eldest of seven or eight children of Henry and Mary Graunt. His father was a draper who had moved to London from Hampshire...
(haberdasher)
- George Green
George Green was a British mathematical physicist who wrote An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism...
(miller)
- André-Michel Guerry
André-Michel Guerry was a French lawyer and amateur statistician. Together with Adolphe Quetelet he may be regarded as the founder of moral statistics which led to the development of criminology, sociology and ultimately, modern social science.- Early life and education :Guerry was born in Tours,...
(lawyer)
- Charles James Hargreave
Charles James Hargreave was an English judge and mathematician.-Life:The eldest son of James Hargreave, woollen manufacturer, he was born at Wortley, Leeds, Yorkshire, in December 1820. He was educated at Bramham, near Leeds, and at University College, London, and took the degree of LL.B. with...
(judge)
- Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques to the solution of differential equations , reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and...
(telegraph operator)
- Kurt Heegner
Kurt Heegner was a German private scholar from Berlin, who specialized inradio engineering and mathematics...
(private scholar)
- Alfred Bray Kempe
Sir Alfred Bray Kempe D.C.L. F.R.S. was a mathematician best known for his work on linkages and the four color theorem....
(lawyer)
- Thomas Kirkman (church rector)
- Emanuel Lasker
Emanuel Lasker was a German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher who was World Chess Champion for 27 years...
(chess player)
- Harry Lindgren
Harry Lindgren was a British/Australian engineer, linguist and amateur mathematician. He was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in England.In 1935 he emigrated to Australia...
(civil servant)
- Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace , born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine...
(countess)
- Kenneth McIntyre
Kenneth Gordon McIntyre OBE was an Australian lawyer, historian and mathematician who is perhaps best known for his controversial book The Secret Discovery of Australia - Portuguese ventures 200 years before Captain Cook....
(lawyer)
- Danica McKellar
Danica Mae McKellar is an American actress, academic, and education advocate. She is best known for her role as Winnie Cooper in the television show The Wonder Years, and later as author of the three The New York Times bestsellers, Math Doesn't Suck, Kiss My Math, and Hot X: Algebra Exposed, which...
(actress)
- Anderson Gray McKendrick
Anderson Gray McKendrick was a Scottish physician and epidemiologist pioneered the use of mathematical methods in epidemiology...
(medical doctor)
- Marin Mersenne
Marin Mersenne, Marin Mersennus or le Père Mersenne was a French theologian, philosopher, mathematician and music theorist, often referred to as the "father of acoustics"...
(theologian)
- Abraham de Moivre
Abraham de Moivre was a French mathematician famous for de Moivre's formula, which links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory. He was a friend of Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and James Stirling...
(bon vivant)
- Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale OM, RRC was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician. She came to prominence for her pioneering work in nursing during the Crimean War, where she tended to wounded soldiers. She was dubbed "The Lady with the Lamp" after her habit of making rounds at night...
(nurse)
- Rudolf Ondrejka (veterinarian)
- Jacques Ozanam
Jacques Ozanam was a French mathematician.-Biography:Jacques Ozanam was born in Sainte-Olive, Ain, France....
(tutor)
- Nicolò Paganini (schoolboy)
- Pāṇini (linguist)
- Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
(heir, private scholar)
- Henry Perigal
Henry Perigal, Jr. FRAS MRI was a British stockbroker and amateur mathematician, known for his dissection-based proof of the Pythagorean theorem and for his unorthodox belief that the moon does not rotate.-Biography:...
(stockbroker)
- Kenneth Perko (lawyer)
- Pingala
Pingala is the traditional name of the author of the ' , the earliest known Sanskrit treatise on prosody.Nothing is known about Piṅgala himself...
(musician)
- William Playfair
William Playfair was a Scottish engineer and political economist, the founder of graphical methods of statistics....
(draftsman)
- Henry Cabourn Pocklington
Henry Cabourn Pocklington was an English physicist and mathematician. His primary profession was as a schoolmaster, but he has made important contributions to number theory with the discovery of Pocklington's primality test in 1914.-References:...
(schoolmaster)
- François Proth
François Proth was a French self-taught mathematician farmer who lived in Vaux-devant-Damloup near Verdun, France. He stated four primality-related theorems, the most famous of which is Proth's theorem, published around 1878...
(farmer)
- Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srīnivāsa Aiyangār Rāmānujan FRS, better known as Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan was a Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions...
(clerk)
- Ramchundra
Ramchundra was British India's first major mathematician. His book, Treatise on Problems of Maxima and Minima, was promoted by the prominent mathematician Augustus De Morgan....
(head master)
- Marjorie Rice
Marjorie Rice is an American homemaker most famous for her discoveries in geometry. She lives in San Diego....
(homemaker)
- Olinde Rodrigues
Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues , more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician, and social reformer.Rodrigues was born into a well-to-do Sephardi Jewish family in Bordeaux....
(banker, social reformer)
- Robert Schlaifer
Robert O. Schlaifer was a pioneer of Bayesian decision theory. At the time of his death he was William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration Emeritus of the Harvard Business School....
, (classics scholar)
- William Shanks
William Shanks was a British amateur mathematician.Shanks is famous for his calculation of π to 707 places, accomplished in 1873, which, however, was only correct up to the first 527 places. This error was highlighted in 1944 by D. F...
(landlord)
- Abraham Sharp
Abraham Sharp was an English mathematician and astronomer.-Biography:Sharp was born in Horton Hall in Little Horton, Bradford, the son of well-to-do merchant John Sharp and Mary Sharp and was educated at Bradford Grammar School.In 1669 he became a merchant's apprentice before becoming a...
, (schoolmaster)
- Simon Stevin
Simon Stevin was a Flemish mathematician and military engineer. He was active in a great many areas of science and engineering, both theoretical and practical...
(merchants clerk)
- Alicia Boole Stott
Alicia Boole Stott was the third daughter of George Boole and Mary Everest Boole, born in Cork, Ireland. Before marrying Walter Stott, an actuary, in 1890, she was known as Alicia Boole...
(Secretary)
- Gaston Tarry
Gaston Tarry was a French mathematician. Born in Villefranche de Rouergue, Aveyron, he studied mathematics at high school before joining the civil service in Algeria....
(civil servant)
- Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia
Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia was a mathematician, an engineer , a surveyor and a bookkeeper from the then-Republic of Venice...
(bookkeeper)
- Sebastien Truchet
Sébastien Truchet was an eclectic Dominican Father born in Lyon and lived in Louis XIV times. He is known for being active in areas such as mathematics, hydraulics, graphics, typography, and for many inventions....
(monk)
- Franciscus Vieta (lawyer)
- Giordano Vitale (soldier)
- William Wallace
William Wallace was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer who invented the eidograph.-Biography:Wallace was born at Dysart in Fife, where he received his school education...
(bookbinder)
- Walter Frank Raphael Weldon
Walter Frank Raphael Weldon DSc FRS generally called Raphael Weldon, was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry...
(evolutionary biologist)
- Johannes Werner
Johann Werner was a German parish priest in Nuremberg and a mathematician...
(parish priest)
- Magnus Wenninger
Father Magnus J. Wenninger OSB is a mathematician who works on constructing polyhedron models, and wrote the first book on their construction.-Early life and education:...
(monk)
- Caspar Wessel
Caspar Wessel was a Norwegian-Danish mathematician and cartographer. In 1799, Wessel was the first person to describe the complex numbers. He was the younger brother of poet and playwright Johan Herman Wessel....
(lawyer)
- Leo Wiener
Leo Wiener was an Americanhistorian, linguist, author and translator of Polish-Jewish origin. Wiener was born in Russia and spent the early part of his childhood there, before coming to the United States alone, with the purpose of creating a vegetarian commune in Belize...
(linguist)
- Frank Wilcoxon
Frank Wilcoxon was a chemist and statistician, known for the development of several statistical tests....
(chemist)
- Edouard Zeckendorf
Edouard Zeckendorf was a Belgian doctor, army officer and mathematician. In mathematics, he is best known for his work on Fibonacci numbers and in particular for proving Zeckendorf's theorem....
(medical doctor)
And the man widely regarded as "The King of Amateurs",
- Pierre de Fermat
Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and an amateur mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his adequality...
(lawyer)
See also
- Stefan Banach
Stefan Banach was a Polish mathematician who worked in interwar Poland and in Soviet Ukraine. He is generally considered to have been one of the 20th century's most important and influential mathematicians....
- Jean-Charles de Borda
Jean-Charles, chevalier de Borda was a French mathematician, physicist, political scientist, and sailor.-Life history:...
- André-Louis Cholesky
André-Louis Cholesky was a French military officer and mathematician, born in Montguyon, France....
- Ada Dietz
Ada K. Dietz was an American weaver best known for her 1949 monograph Algebraic Expressions in Handwoven Textiles, which defines a novel method for generating weaving patterns based on algebraic patterns. Her method employs the expansion of multivariate polynomials to devise a weaving scheme...
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
- Robert Leslie Ellis
Robert Leslie Ellis was an English polymath, remembered principally as a mathematician and editor of the works of Francis Bacon....
- Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
- Angelo Genocchi
Angelo Genocchi was an Italian mathematician who specialized in number theory. He worked with Giuseppe Peano. The Genocchi numbers are named after him.-References:...
- Sophie Germain
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by a gender-biased society, she gained education from books in her father's library and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as...
- Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury , in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy...
- Émile Lemoine
Émile Michel Hyacinthe Lemoine was a French civil engineer and a mathematician, a geometer in particular. He was educated at a variety of institutions, including the Prytanée National Militaire and, most notably, the École Polytechnique...
- Ludwig Immanuel Magnus
Ludwig Immanuel Magnus was a German Jewish mathematician who, in 1831, published a paper about the inversion transformation, which leads to inversive geometry....
- Henry Mann
Henry Berthold Mann was a professor of mathematics and statistics at Ohio State University. Mann proved the Schnirelmann-Landau conjecture in number theory, and as a result earned the 1946 Cole Prize. He and his student developed the U-statistic of nonparametric statistics...
- Simon Newcomb
Simon Newcomb was a Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician. Though he had little conventional schooling, he made important contributions to timekeeping as well as writing on economics and statistics and authoring a science fiction novel.-Early life:Simon Newcomb was born in the town of...
- Paul Painlevé
Paul Painlevé was a French mathematician and politician. He served twice as Prime Minister of the Third Republic: 12 September – 13 November 1917 and 17 April – 22 November 1925.-Early life:Painlevé was born in Paris....
- Richard A. Parker
Richard A. Parker is a mathematician and freelance computer programmer in Cambridge, England. He invented many of the algorithms for computing the modular character tables of finite simple groups...
- Ludwig Schläfli
Ludwig Schläfli was a Swiss geometer and complex analyst who was one of the key figures in developing the notion of higher dimensional spaces. The concept of multidimensionality has since come to play a pivotal role in physics, and is a common element in science fiction...
- Marcel-Paul Schützenberger
Marcel-Paul "Marco" Schützenberger was a French mathematician and Doctor of Medicine. His work had impact across the fields of formal language, combinatorics, and information theory...
- William James Sidis
William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic abilities. His IQ was estimated to be between 250 and 300 - one of the highest ever recorded - he entered Harvard early at age 11, and as an adult was conversant in over 40 languages and dialects...
- Alfred Young
Alfred Young, FRS was a British mathematician.He was born in Widnes, Lancashire, England and educated at Monkton Combe School in Somerset and Clare College, Cambridge, graduating BA as 10th Wrangler in 1895. He is known for his work in the area of group theory...
- H. C. von Warnsdorf
- Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....