Inspiring Mathematicians

Leonhard Euler (1707- 1783)
The most prolific mathematician of all time, publishing close to 900 books. When he went blind in his late 50s his productivity in many areas increased. His famous formula eiπ + 1 = 0, where e is the mathematical constant sometimes known as Euler's number and i is the square root of minus one, is widely considered the most beautiful in mathematics. He later took an interest in Latin squares – grids where each row and column contains each member of a set of numbers or objects once. Without this work, we might not have had sudoku.

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)

Known as the prince of mathematicians, Gauss made significant contributions to most fields of 19th century mathematics. An obsessive perfectionist, he didn't publish much of his work, preferring to rework and improve theorems first. His revolutionary discovery of non-Euclidean space (that it is mathematically consistent that parallel lines may diverge) was found in his notes after his death. During his analysis of astronomical data, he realised that measurement error produced a bell curve – and that shape is now known as a Gaussian distribution.

taken from

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/apr/11/the-10-best-mathematicians