Presentation on Mathematicians and their contributions. YASH ACADEMY, SONAI.

1. Life and their contributions in the field of
Mathematics

2. INDEX
1. Benjamin banneker
2. Jon Barwise
3. James Waddell AlexanderII
4.David Blackwell
5. Ann S. Almgren

3. 1.Benjamin Banneker
1731-1806

4. Benjamin Banneker, an African American mathematician, astronomer
and surveyor was born on 9th November 1731. His family history is not
very well known but there are however many assumptions. According to
some writers and historians he was of the European American ancestry
with his mother being a servant who came to America whereas none of
Banneker’s papers mentions a white ancestor giving him an African root
only. Banneker liked watching the stars from the very beginning. Later
when he grew up he studied astronomy by borrowing books from other
people. He was inspired by an industrialist in Maryland, Joseph Ellicott
and started astronomical calculations in 1773. In 1789 he had made a
prediction about a solar eclipse which really did occur. Banneker was a
supporter of peace and strictly opposed racial discrimination. In 1793 he
proposed a peace plan for America which included many points
including a suggestion that there should be a ‘Secretary of Peace’. In his
letters to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the United States Declaration of
Independence and was the US secretary of State.

5. 2.Jon Barwise
1942-2000

6. Born in Independence, Missouri to Kenneth T. and Evelyn Barwise, Jon was
a precocious child. A pupil of Solomon Feferman at Stanford University,
Barwise started his research in infinitary logic. After positions as assistant
professor at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin, during which
time his interests turned to natural language, he returned to Stanford in
1983 to direct the Center for the Study of Language and Information. He
began teaching at Indiana University in 1990. Barwise, along with his
former colleague at Stanford John Etchemendy, was the author of the
popular logic textbook Language, Proof and Logic. Unlike the Handbook of
Mathematical Logic which was a survey of the state of the art
of Mathematical logic c. 1975, and of which he was the editor, this work
targeted elementary logic. The text is notable for including computer-aided
homework problems, some of which provide visual representations of
logical problems. During his time at Stanford, he was also the first Director
of the Symbolic Systems Program, an interdepartmental degree program
focusing on the relationships between cognition, language, logic, and
computation. The K. Jon Barwise Award for Distinguished Contributions to
the Symbolic Systems Program has been given periodically since 2001.

7. 3.James Waddell Alexandre II
1888-1971

8. James was born on September 19, 1888, in Sea Bright, New Jersey. Alexander came
from an old, distinguished Princeton family. He was the only child of the
American portrait painter John White Alexander and Elizabeth Alexander. His
maternal grandfather, James Waddell Alexander, was the president of
the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Alexander's affluence and upbringing
allowed him to interact with high society in America and elsewhere. He married
Natalia Levitzkaja on January 11, 1918, a Russian woman. Together, they had two
children. They would frequently spend time, until 1937, in the Chamonix area
of France, where he would also climb mountains and hills. Alexander was also a
noted mountaineer, having succeeded in many major ascents, e.g. in the Swiss
Alps and Colorado Rockies. When in Princeton, he liked to climb the university
buildings, and always left his office window on the top floor of Fine Hall open so
that he could enter by climbing the building. He graduated from Princeton
University with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1910. He received his Masters of
Arts degree in 1911 and his doctoral degree in 1915.

9. 4. David Blackwell
1919-2010

10. David Harold Blackwell (April 24, 1919 – July 8, 2010) was an
American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions
to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics. He is
one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African
American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first black tenured
faculty member at UC Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D.
in Mathematics. Blackwell was also a pioneer in textbook writing. He wrote one of
the first Bayesian textbooks, his 1969 Basic Statistics. By the time he retired, he had
published over 90 books and papers on dynamic programming, game theory, and
mathematical statistics. David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919,
in Centralia, Illinois to Mabel Johnson Blackwell, a full-time homemaker, and Grover
Blackwell, an Illinois Central Railroad worker.[5] He was the eldest of four
children.Growing up in an integrated community, Blackwell attended “mixed”
schools, where he distinguished himself in mathematics. During elementary school,
his teachers promoted him beyond his grade level on two occasions. It was in a high
school geometry course, however, that his passion for math began. Blackwell entered
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the intent to study elementary
school mathematics and become a teacher. In 1938 he earned his bachelor's degree
in mathematics and a master's degree in 1939, and was awarded a PhD in
mathematics in 1941 at the age of 22, all by the University of Illinois.

11. 5. Ann S. Almgren

12. Ann S. Almgren is an American applied mathematician who works as a senior
scientist and group leader of the Center for Computational Sciences and
Engineering at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her primary
research interests are in computational algorithms for solving PDE's for fluid
dynamics in a variety of application areas. Her current projects include the
development and implementation of new multiphysics algorithms in high-
resolution adaptive mesh codes that are designed for the latest multicore
architectures. Almgren is the daughter of mathematician Frederick J. Almgren,
Jr. and his first wife, Beverly Stewart.[2] She earned a bachelor's degree
in physics from Harvard University in 1984 and master's and doctoral degrees
in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987
and 1991 respectively. After visiting the Institute for Advanced Study, she
joined the applied mathematics group of the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in 1992, and moved to the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in 1996. In 2015 she became a fellow of the Society for Industrial
and Applied Mathematics "for contributions to the development of numerical
methods for fluid dynamics and applying them to large-scale scientific and
engineering problems."[4] She also serves on the editorial boards of
SIREV[5] and CAMCoS.