Mathematician Birthdays in October

October has a surprisingly ridiculous collection of mathematician birthdays. Here are some of the mathematicians born this month and why you might recognize their names.

October 2: Michio Suzuki (1926)
Suzuki discovered the Suzuki groups, an infinite family of finite simple groups. If you have spent any time around finite group theory, his name shows up pretty quickly.

October 3: Pierre Deligne (1944)
Deligne is a Fields Medalist and Abel Prize winner whose work had a major impact on algebraic geometry and number theory.

October 6: Richard Dedekind (1831)
Dedekind made fundamental contributions to number theory and abstract algebra. Dedekind cuts give a rigorous construction of the real numbers, and Dedekind domains remain important in algebraic number theory.

October 6: Sergei Sobolev (1908)
Sobolev introduced what we now call Sobolev spaces. They became fundamental objects in analysis and the study of partial differential equations.

October 6: Abraham Robinson (1918)
Robinson developed nonstandard analysis, providing a rigorous mathematical framework in which infinitesimals could actually be used.

October 6: Robert Langlands (1936)
Langlands created the Langlands program, a huge collection of conjectures connecting number theory, representation theory and geometry.

Apparently October 6 was a pretty good day for mathematics.

October 9: Fan Chung (1949)
Chung is known for major contributions to graph theory and combinatorics, particularly spectral graph theory.

October 11: Alfréd Haar (1885)
Haar’s name appears all over modern mathematics. Haar measure is fundamental in harmonic analysis and the study of topological groups, while Haar wavelets became important in analysis and signal processing.

October 11: Cahit Arf (1910)
Arf made important contributions to algebra and number theory. The Arf invariant, Arf rings and Arf closure all carry his name.

October 11: Harish-Chandra (1923)
Harish-Chandra was one of the major figures in twentieth-century representation theory, particularly the representation theory of Lie groups.

October 13: Viggo Brun (1885)
Brun developed an important sieve method in number theory. He also proved that the sum of the reciprocals of the twin primes converges, even though we still do not know whether there are infinitely many twin primes.

October 13: John G. Thompson (1932)
Thompson is a Fields Medalist whose work transformed finite group theory. His work with Walter Feit proving that every finite group of odd order is solvable became one of the major results leading toward the classification of finite simple groups.

October 15: André-Louis Cholesky (1875)
Cholesky developed what we now call Cholesky decomposition, a standard method for decomposing certain matrices and an important tool in numerical linear algebra.

October 15: Jakob Nielsen (1890)
Nielsen made major contributions to topology and group theory. Nielsen transformations and Nielsen fixed-point theory carry his name.

October 17: Paul Bernays (1888)
Bernays was an important figure in mathematical logic and the foundations of mathematics. His work with set theory is reflected in what is now called von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel set theory.

October 17: Friedrich Hirzebruch (1927)
Hirzebruch made major contributions to topology, algebraic geometry and complex geometry. The Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem is one of the results most closely associated with him.

October 18: George E. P. Box (1919)
Box was a major statistician who worked on experimental design and time-series analysis. He is also associated with the wonderfully useful idea that all models are wrong, but some are useful.

October 18: Dusa McDuff (1945)
McDuff is a major figure in symplectic geometry and topology and helped shape the modern development of symplectic topology.

October 21: Martin Gardner (1914)
Gardner was not primarily a research mathematician, but his writing introduced generations of people to recreational mathematics through his long-running Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

October 22: Rolf Nevanlinna (1895)
Nevanlinna developed Nevanlinna theory, which became an important part of complex analysis and the study of meromorphic functions.

October 22: Sarvadaman Chowla (1907)
Chowla made important contributions to analytic number theory. His name appears on several problems and results, including the Chowla conjecture.

October 25: Évariste Galois (1811)
Galois developed the ideas that became Galois theory, connecting polynomial equations with groups and helping lay the foundations of modern abstract algebra. He did all of this before dying at age 20.

October 26: Ferdinand Georg Frobenius (1849)
Frobenius made fundamental contributions to group theory, representation theory and linear algebra. His name appears throughout modern algebra, from Frobenius groups to the Frobenius endomorphism.

October 26: Shiing-Shen Chern (1911)
Chern was one of the great geometers of the twentieth century. Chern classes became fundamental objects connecting geometry, topology and complex manifolds.

October 26: Walter Feit (1930)
Feit and John Thompson proved the Feit-Thompson theorem: every finite group of odd order is solvable. The proof was a landmark in finite group theory and an important step toward the classification of finite simple groups.

October 27: Gladys West (1930)
West’s mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth contributed to the geodetic foundations eventually used in GPS technology.

October 30: Andrey Tikhonov (1906)
Tikhonov worked in topology, differential equations and applied mathematics. Tikhonov regularization remains an important technique for dealing with ill-posed problems.

October 30: Harold Davenport (1907)
Davenport was one of the major number theorists of the twentieth century, particularly known for work in analytic number theory and Diophantine approximation.

October 30: Marina Ratner (1938)
Ratner proved a remarkable collection of results in ergodic theory now known as Ratner’s theorems. Her work connected dynamical systems, geometry and number theory.

October 30: William Thurston (1946)
Thurston revolutionized low-dimensional topology and geometry and received the Fields Medal in 1982. His geometrization ideas fundamentally changed the study of 3-manifolds.

October 31: Karl Weierstrass (1815)
Weierstrass helped put mathematical analysis on a rigorous foundation. He is also famous for the Weierstrass function, a continuous function that is nowhere differentiable.

October 31: Abraham Wald (1902)
Wald made major contributions to statistics, decision theory and sequential analysis. He is also associated with the famous World War II aircraft example used to explain survivorship bias.

October 31: Ronald Graham (1935)
Graham was a giant of discrete mathematics, particularly combinatorics and Ramsey theory. Outside mathematics, his name became famous because of Graham’s number, an absurdly enormous number that arose from an actual mathematical problem.

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