Explore these biographies of real people who found mathematical patterns in nature and the world around them fascinating and used them in their work.
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős: Paul Erdős found patterns in numbers and became a world traveler, visiting mathematicians all over the world to work together on new ideas.
Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci: Fibonacci found patterns in nature and numbers, and discovered what came to be known as the famous Fibonacci sequence.
Maryam’s Magic: The Story of Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani: The Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani found patterns in geometry, the study of shapes, discovering new ideas which she loved to sketch out on paper.
Friend of Numbers: The Life of Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan: Srinivasa Ramanujan found patterns in numbers as a young boy, later traveling to England from his home country of India to learn more mathematics and share his discoveries.
Numbers in Motion: Sophie Kowalevski, Queen of Mathematics: Russian mathematician Sophie Kowalevski found patterns in numbers, and went on to become a trailblazing woman in mathematics.
Grasping Mysteries: Girls Who Loved Math: Stories of seven groundbreaking women made discoveries and inventions with math, including:
- Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet and to earn a salary for scientific research.
- Florence Nightingale was a trailblazing nurse whose work reformed hospitals and one of the founders of the field of medical statistics.
- The first female electrical engineer, Hertha Marks Ayrton registered twenty-six patents for her inventions.
- Marie Tharp helped create the first map of the entire ocean floor, which helped scientists understand our subaquatic world and suggested how the continents shifted.
- A mathematical prodigy, Katherine Johnson calculated trajectories and launch windows for many NASA projects including the Apollo 11 mission.
- Edna Lee Paisano, a citizen of the Nez Perce Nation, was the first Native American to work full time for the Census Bureau, overseeing a large increase in American Indian and Alaskan Native representation.
- Vera Rubin studied more than two hundred galaxies and found the first strong evidence for dark matter.