Famous in STEM: Mathematical Masterminds

Famous in STEM: Mathematical Masterminds

A seven-year-old boy solves a problem in seconds that was meant to keep his class busy for an hour. A self-taught genius from India fills notebooks with formulas that stun Cambridge’s finest minds. A woman’s calculations send astronauts to the moon. These are the stories of history’s greatest mathematicians. Inside Mathematical Masterminds , the second volume in the bestselling Famous in STEM series, you’ll meet the brilliant, eccentric, and often tragically underappreciated figures who built the language of the universe — one equation at a time. Discover the minds behind the math: • Carl Friedrich Gauss — the “Prince of Mathematics” who stunned his teacher at age seven and never stopped • Alan Turing — cracked the Nazi Enigma code, fathered computer science, and was persecuted for who he loved • Srinivasa Ramanujan — a self-taught prodigy from rural India whose mysterious formulas still baffle mathematicians today • Katherine Johnson — the NASA mathematician whose hand calculations put John Glenn into orbit • Ada Lovelace — wrote the world’s first computer program a century before computers existed • John Nash — revolutionized game theory while battling decades of paranoid schizophrenia • …and 16 more remarkable stories of obsession, genius, and the beauty of numbers From Pythagoras’s secret mathematical cult to Euler’s superhuman productivity (even after going blind), each chapter turns abstract equations into human drama. You don’t need to be a math expert to love this book — just curious about the people who saw patterns the rest of us couldn’t. Featuring 22 mathematicians. Part of the Famous in STEM series.