History's Greatest Geeks, Part One

Geeks are not really all that new a thing.  We have been around for a very long time, though we were not always called "geeks."  In any case, history is full of those who fit would we would call "geekdom."  I thought it might be interesting to consider a few...

The problem is not finding ones to name, but instead is having an abundance of riches.  I know I will miss more than a few, so this list is by no means meant to be comprehensive, but instead to look at some of the great ones.

Archimedes

Archimedes is a good one to start with.  He was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer.  His is credited with several discoveries, including his work in determining density, which arose from the request that he determine if a crown produced for the king was solid gold, or if the goldsmith had pilfered some, using silver to make up the difference.

He was taking a bath when he realized that his body was displacing an amount of water equivalent to his volume.  Based on that, he could determine the volume of the crown, and therefore determine its density, which would be less if silver had been substituted for gold.  He was so excited that he ran back home without remembering to dress, dashing through the streets yelling "eureka!"(literally, "I have found it!").

Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher.  He discovered the first four moons of Jupiter, he was the father of modern physics, and in perhaps one of his geekiest moments, he gave us Galileo's Paradox.  He observed that some numbers are perfect squares, that is, they are the square of an integer.  But not all integers, are perfect squares and in fact, most are not.  So, there must be more that are not perfect squares than that are.  But, all integers are the square roots of a perfect sq are.  Put in simple terms, there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares.  This seems a contradiction, and Galileo concluded that more, less, and equal do not apply to infinite sets.  But, in truth, as strange as it seems, some infinite sets are bigger than others.

He, along with Archimedes can thought of as the giants whose shoulders our next geek stood on...

Sir Isaac Newton

Newton was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who was one of the most influential people in human history.  He gave us the basis for classical mechanics including the three laws of motion:

First Law: An object at rest tends to stay at rest, or if it is in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by a sum of physical forces.


Second Law: A body will accelerate with acceleration proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass.


Third Law: Every action has a reaction equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Another major contribution of Newton was the development of calculus.  He was the first to organize it into a specific field of mathematics, and also was responsible for some of the first applications.  He was not the only one to contribute to its development, which brings us to our next figure from history...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz was a German mathematician who a invented calculus independently of Newton.  In fact, they were involved in a bitter rivalry over which invented it first.  Today, Leibniz's notation is the one used in calculus, though both contributed ideas to the subject, and as noted above, Newton was the first to organize it into an independent subject.

Of equal importance to geeks everywhere is Leibniz's documentation of the binary number system which he associate with the I Ching.

Leibniz also made contributions to the field of topology.

Leonhard Euler

Euler was a contemporary of Leibniz and the man who gave us the exponential function and logarithms. He also contributed to the field of complex numbers and gave us Euler's Identity, which is one of the most profound statements in all of mathematics.

This combines five of the most important constants in mathematics.  The constant e is an interesting, number that shows up in many diverse places in mathematics and science.  It is an irrational number(i.e. it can not be expressed by m/n where m and n are integers.  Pi, the ratio of the diameter and circumfrunce of a circle, and is also irrational.  And i, is the imaginary number that is the square root of -1.  And of course, 1 and 0 are rather obvious in their importance.

Well, that is just a few of the numerous geeks from history.  In future articles we will look at others, both living and dead.  And both real, and fictional.