Mathematics & Statistics

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Mathematicians or statisticians born on May 10:

Augustin Fresnel, 1788 - 1827 - did important work on optics where he was one of the founders of the wave theory of light. Biography

Wilhelm Killing, 1847 - 1923 - a German mathematician who introduced Lie algebras independently of Lie in his study of non-euclidean geometry. His classification of the simple Lie algebras was one of the finest achievements in the whole of mathematical research. Biography

Otakar Boruvka, 1899 - 1995 Biography

Edward McShane, 1904 - 1989 Biography

** Those who died on this day:

Paolo Ruffini, 1765 - 1822 - an Italian mathematician who gave a proof that the quintic equation could not be solved earlier than Abel. Biography

Thomas Young, 1773 - 1829 - an English mathematician and physicist best known for Young's modulus and his work on interference. Biography

August Gutzmer, 1860 - 1924 - a German mathematician who worked on differential equations. Biography

Diederik Korteweg, 1848 - 1941 - a Dutch mathematician with wide interests, now best-known as the joint discoverer of the Korteweg-de Vries equation for solitary waves. Biography

Guido Ascoli, 1887 - 1957 Biography

Hassler Whitney, 1907 - 1989 - an American mathematician who did important work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, characteristic classes and geometric integration theory. Biography

Kollagunta Ramanathan, 1920 - 1992 Biography

Ambros Speiser, 1922 - 2003 Biography

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