Math Madness 2k17 Champion!

The Math Madness 2k17 Champion is Here!

The events leading up to this moment have been exciting. We've seen upsets, landslide victories, and to-the-teeth battles, but as each mathematician falls, the taste of the coming victory becomes stronger. On this day, the dream to be deemed champion is going to become a reality for either Cauchy or Ramanujan.

See who won after the break.

Math Madness Week 3: The Final Four!

Only Four Remain in This Week's Trial of Math!

Vote here for the final two!

Math Madness Week Two

Math madness week one has drawn to a close, and so now where sixteen brilliant minds once stood, only eight remain. A few matches stood out with some nail-biting action, while most others were won in landslide fashion. Namely, the come-from-behind victory pulled off by Ada Lovelace to defeat Hausdorff really rocked the boat. I gotta say, the action in those few close matches may not have been enough to make for the most thrilling week of sports, but I'm looking at this week's bracket ant it is looking to be a thriller.

Our first match features Turing and Cauchy, two mathematicians who blew away their opponents last week. Fans are going to have to make a tough choice here, so I have a feeling it will come down to the bone on this limb of the bracket.

Coming up after that, it's the battle of physicists: Poincare and Maxwell. Will Poincare's work on chaotic systems beat out Maxwell's ordering and unification of electro-magnetic waves? I think Maxwell may be in for an upset defeat, as last week he struggled to edge out a win against Emile Borel, but only time can answer this question, who will move on to the final four?

This next match is a face-off between Lovelace and Ramanujan, and perhaps the most high profile game this week. These two mathematicians are world renowned, making this duel as close to a celebrity match this year's tournament will see.

And finally, Lebesgue and Abel will vie for a spot in the final four. While both competitors pulled off
a comfortable victory last week, neither one flat out blew away the competition, so I feel slightly lukewarm about this matchup. Either way, the victor will have to go up against Ramanujan or Lovelace, and that will be the real test.

Signing off from the Worldwide Center of Mathematics, this has been your introduction to week two of #MATHmadness2k17. Vote Here

Math Madness Results

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The Madness has ended!!

In the last Math Madness blog post, we released the winners of the Elite 8 matchups. Then we were down to the Final Four: Newton was up against Gauss, and Euler had to face Riemann. We set up a poll on Friday night and our voters decided: Newton won his match, and Euler his. So we entered the championship last night.

So the two mathematical giants faced off, and we set up a new poll on Monday night to ask our voters to help us decide the winner, the most significant mathematician of all time, and the result is...

Math Madness: The Elite 8

As we whittle down our list of mathematicians, the choices get harder and harder. We published all of the results of the Sweet 16 (click the Math Madness label in the sidebar if you need to find an old post!) and we've got the Elite 8 results right here.

Match 1: Newton vs. Erdös

Check out these short bios for Newton and Erdös.

Both men were important, and both men had eccentric personalities according to biographies. Erdös was a self-proclaimed “solver” more than an innovator of mathematics. For this reason, we award this round to Newton, who created calculus, an entire branch in the tree of mathematics, as well as solving problems of his time. But, Newton will never have a good Erdös number!

Math Madness: Round 1 Part 4

Here is the final update on the matches of our Sweet 16 in the Math Madness Bracket! Keep checking both the blog and the website for updates. One more blog post will show the results of our Elite Eight matches, and then voting will be open to all Center of Math readers to decide our Final Two and then the Champion!

Match 7: Hilbert vs. Poincaré

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Match 7  shows two mathematicians from the same era against each other: the German David Hilbert versus the French Henri Poincaré.

A mathematician who got his feet wet in many branches of mathematics, Poincaré has earned credit for the creation of generalized elliptic functions, the discovery of connections between automorphic functions in the same group, the Poincaré conjecture, and much more. Perhaps his most prestigious contribution was the solution of the three-body problem, which eluded mathematicians since Newton. Poincaré had a strange path to mathematics- he actually earned a degree in mining engineering, and became a mine inspector for several years. He was actually completing his thesis for a mathematics doctorate at the same time in the field of differential equations. In 1912, Poincaré died at the age of 58. 

Math Madness: First Round Part 3

Here we have two more matches, with suprising results. Read on to find out more about why these upsets are occuring!

Match 5: Leibniz vs. Erdös

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Now, we have Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German mathematician born in 1646, against the more modern Paul Erdös.

Leibniz was a bit of a renaissance man, whose work in philosophy, physics, and mathematics remains important to this day.  He was self-taught in mathematics, but independently developed calculus. His ideas were published a short time after Newton’s, but his notation (integral sign and derivatives) was far superior, and is still in use today.  Leibniz also offered contributions to the field of differential equations, and discovered the method of separation of variables. Most of Leibniz’s other work focused on physics.

Math Madness: First Round Part 2

Here's the second round of results from the Math Madness bracket (view the first post here).Keep checking in on the Math Madness webpage- we'll update the bracket image when we've released all the first round winners!

Match 3: Gauss vs. Gromov

The third match sees Carl Friedrich Gauss, a German mathematician, against the modern mathematician Mikhail Gromov.

Math Madness: First Round

Math Madness is under way here at the Center of Math. We've made our decision for the first two matches, which we'll describe here. Keep checking in on the Math Madness webpage- we'll update the bracket image when we've released all the first round winners!

Match 1: Newton vs. Abel 

In this match, we’ve pitted the famous 1600s physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton against Niels Henrik Abel, after whom the Abel prize in mathematics is named.

Newton, born into a poor farming family in 1642, went to Cambridge to become a preacher, and then found his love of mathematics. His contributions to mathematics are numerous- the most significant of which is perhaps the invention of Calculus, which he developed separately from Leibniz.  Not just a mathematician- Newton was also an accomplished physicist. He penned the Principia Mathematica, inside which the Laws of Motion are written. According to Wolfram Science World, Newton “contributed more to the development of science than any other individual in history.”

Abel was a Norwegian mathematician and young prodigy. At only 16 years of age, Abel determined a proof of the binomial theorem, making it valid for all numbers and expanding Euler’s findings. He independently invented the basis of group theory.  As a member of a very poor family, Abel had to enter the Royal Frederick University on scholarship. However, by the time he entered, he had independently studied so much mathematics that his professors couldn’t teach him anything new. Abel never obtained a professorial position, though he tried for several years after his degree. He died of tuberculosis at 26 years old before seeing recognition for his work.

Math Madness- the Sweet 16

Math Madness has begun at the Center of Mathematics! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, view our newest webpage and feast your eyes. Our mission is to determine the greatest, most influential mathematician of all time. Check back often for information about voting!

Math Madness has begun!

We had to narrow down a list of hundreds of influential, important mathematicians to just 16. We wanted to choose a variety of mathematicians: some ancient, some modern, some geometers, some number theorists, some famous, some more obscure but significant. We even recruited the opinion of visiting mathematician Lê Dung Tráng to decide on our Sweet 16.