Thinkers Timeline

Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who changed how we understand algebra and physics. She was born in 1882 in Erlangen, Germany. Her father was a mathematics professor. At the time, women were not allowed to study at German universities as full students. She had to sit in on classes without being officially enrolled. She finished her doctorate in 1907, but she could not get a paid teaching job because she was a woman. In 1915, the famous mathematician David Hilbert invited her to the University of Göttingen. He tried to get her a proper position. The university refused. For years, she had to teach under Hilbert's name and received no pay. She did not complain. She just kept doing brilliant work. Her ideas were so new that many people did not understand them at first. She worked on abstract algebra. This is a part of mathematics that studies the structure behind numbers and shapes. She also helped Einstein with his theory of general relativity. In 1933, the Nazis came to power and forced her out of her job because she was Jewish. She moved to the United States and taught at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She died there in 1935, aged only 53, after surgery went wrong.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician born in 1887 in Erode, a small town in Tamil Nadu. His family was poor but educated. His father was a clerk and his mother was a devout Hindu. From a young age, he loved numbers. By the age of twelve, he was working through advanced mathematics books on his own. He had very little formal mathematical training. He failed his college exams because he spent all his time on mathematics and neglected other subjects. He lost his scholarship. He worked as a clerk in Madras and did mathematics in every spare moment. He filled notebooks with thousands of results, many of which were new and surprising. In 1913, he wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, a leading mathematician at Cambridge University in England. The letter contained strange and beautiful formulas. Hardy was amazed. He invited Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914. The two men worked together for five years. Ramanujan produced brilliant results on number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Life in England was hard. The climate was cold. The food was wrong for his vegetarian diet. He became very ill, possibly with tuberculosis or a parasitic infection. He returned to India in 1919 and died in 1920, aged only 32. His notebooks are still being studied today.

William Edwards Deming (1900-1993) was an American statistician and management consultant whose work on quality control and systematic thinking about production reshaped manufacturing in Japan after the Second World War and, later, in the United States. He was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and grew up in a small town in Wyoming under difficult family circumstances. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Wyoming, earned a master's degree in mathematics and physics at the University of Colorado, and completed a PhD in mathematical physics at Yale in 1928. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture and then the Census Bureau, where he applied statistical methods to sampling and the design of surveys. In 1947 he was invited to help prepare the Japanese census and returned to Japan in the early 1950s at the invitation of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers. His lectures on statistical quality control and his broader management philosophy were widely adopted by Japanese industry, where he became a famous and revered figure decades before his ideas were taken seriously in his own country. The Deming Prize, established in Japan in 1951 and still awarded annually, recognised his influence. In the United States his work was largely ignored until a 1980 NBC documentary, If Japan Can, Why Can't We, brought him to public attention at the age of eighty. He spent his final thirteen years teaching, consulting, and writing; his major book Out of the Crisis appeared in 1982. He continued leading seminars until shortly before his death in 1993, aged ninety-three.

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992) was an American mathematician, computer scientist, and United States Navy rear admiral whose work on programming languages and compilers helped turn computing from a specialist craft into a discipline ordinary people could enter. She was born in New York City to a family that encouraged her scientific curiosity from childhood — at seven, she took apart seven alarm clocks to see how they worked. She studied mathematics and physics at Vassar College and earned a doctorate in mathematics from Yale in 1934, an unusual achievement for a woman of her era. She taught mathematics at Vassar until the United States entered the Second World War. In 1943, at thirty-seven, she joined the Naval Reserve and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard, where she became one of the first programmers of the Mark I, one of the earliest large electromechanical computers. After the war she moved into private industry, joining Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and later Remington Rand and Sperry. At these companies she developed the first practical compiler, a program that translates human-readable instructions into machine code, and led the team that created FLOW-MATIC, a predecessor of COBOL. She was recalled to naval service several times and finally retired from the Navy as a rear admiral at seventy-nine, the oldest officer in active service at the time. She continued to lecture widely until her death in 1992.

Kurt Gödel was an Austrian-American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. He is widely considered the greatest logician of the 20th century. His incompleteness theorems changed how mathematicians and philosophers understand the foundations of mathematics. He was born in 1906 in Brunn, then part of Austria-Hungary (now Brno in the Czech Republic). His parents were ethnic Germans living in a mostly Czech city. His father managed a textile factory. The family was comfortable. Young Kurt was a quiet, curious child. He asked so many questions that his family nicknamed him 'Mr. Why'. He suffered through a serious illness with rheumatic fever at age six, which he believed had permanently damaged his heart, even though doctors found no lasting damage. The belief shaped his fearful approach to his own health for the rest of his life. He studied at the University of Vienna in the 1920s. He attended the famous Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers and scientists who met to discuss the foundations of knowledge. He earned his doctorate in mathematics in 1929. The next year, he proved his most famous result, the incompleteness theorems. He was 24. In the 1930s, the rise of Nazism made Vienna dangerous. Gödel was not Jewish but had Jewish friends and colleagues. After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938 and the start of World War II, he and his wife Adele fled to America. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein also worked. The two became close friends. Gödel did important later work in cosmology and philosophy. He died in 1978 of malnutrition. He had become so paranoid about poisoning that he stopped eating after his wife was hospitalised.

Alan Turing was an English mathematician, codebreaker, and founder of modern computer science. He was born in London on 23 June 1912. His father worked in the Indian Civil Service, which meant Turing's parents spent much of his childhood abroad. He and his older brother were often raised by foster families in England. As a boy he was shy, odd, and brilliant at mathematics. He studied at King's College, Cambridge, and then earned a PhD at Princeton in 1938. In 1936, while still a student, he wrote a paper called On Computable Numbers. It described an imaginary machine that could follow simple rules to perform any calculation. This imaginary machine, now called a Turing machine, became the theoretical foundation of every modern computer. When the Second World War began in September 1939, Turing joined the British codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. He helped design a machine called the Bombe, used to break the German Enigma code. His work is thought to have shortened the war by years. He was awarded the OBE in 1945. After the war, Turing worked on building real computers in London and Manchester. In 1950 he proposed the Turing test, a way of asking whether a computer could think. He also began work on mathematical biology. In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for being gay, which was then illegal in Britain. He was forced to take hormone treatment as punishment. He died on 7 June 1954, aged 41, from cyanide poisoning. His death was ruled a suicide. In 2013 he received a formal royal pardon.

Claude Shannon was an American mathematician and engineer. He invented the field of information theory. His work made the digital age possible. Almost every technology that uses digital signals (mobile phones, the internet, computers, GPS, streaming, modern medical imaging) depends on ideas Shannon developed in the 1930s and 1940s. He was born in 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan, and grew up in the small town of Gaylord. His father was a small-town judge. His mother was a language teacher and school principal. Shannon was a clever, curious child. He built his own telegraph as a teenager, using barbed wire fences to connect with a friend's house. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1936. He went to MIT for graduate work. His 1937 master's thesis, written when he was 21, applied Boolean logic (a form of mathematical logic developed in the 19th century) to electrical circuits. The work showed that any logical operation could be performed by appropriate combinations of switches. The thesis has been called the most important master's thesis of the 20th century. It became the foundation for designing all digital computer hardware. During the Second World War, Shannon worked on cryptography (the science of codes) at Bell Laboratories. He met the British codebreaker Alan Turing during the war. The two men had lunch together regularly when Turing visited the United States. After the war, Shannon stayed at Bell Labs. In 1948, he published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, the founding paper of information theory. He was 32. He continued working at Bell Labs and later at MIT until he developed Alzheimer's disease in the 1990s. He died in 2001.

Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician. She did the calculations that helped send the first American astronauts into space and to the Moon. She worked at NASA for over 30 years. She was a Black woman in a field that was largely white and male. Her work was central to the success of the early American space programme. She was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Her birth name was Katherine Coleman. From a young age, she loved counting. She counted everything: steps, dishes, the stars. She was so advanced that she finished primary school by age 10. The local town did not have a high school for Black children. Her father moved the family 200 kilometres so that Katherine and her siblings could attend a school that did. She went on to West Virginia State, a historically Black college, and graduated with degrees in mathematics and French at 18. In 1953 she joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which became NASA in 1958. She was hired as a 'human computer'. Before electronic computers were trusted, dozens of women did mathematical calculations by hand. Black women at NACA were segregated from white women. They worked in a separate building with separate bathrooms. Johnson pushed past these limits. She joined the all-male Flight Research Division. She did calculations for the first American manned space flights. In 1962, before John Glenn orbited Earth, he asked specifically for Johnson to verify the computer's calculations by hand. He trusted her over the machine. She continued at NASA until 1986. She lived to be 101, dying in 2020.