Once, the Queen of Russia invited the French philosopher Diderot to visit her court. Diderot tried to prove himself worthy of being invited by converting courtiers to atheism. Tired, the queen ordered Euler to shut the philosopher up. So Diderot was told that a learned mathematician had proved the existence of God by algebra, and if he wanted to listen, the mathematician would give this proof in front of all courtiers. Diderot accepted the challenge happily.
The next day, in court, Euler found Diderot and said solemnly in a very positive tone: "Sir, therefore God exists. Please answer! " For Diderot, this sounds reasonable. He was confused and didn't know what to say. The people around him laughed loudly, which made the poor man feel ashamed. He asked the queen to allow him to return to France immediately, and the queen agreed very calmly.
In this way, a great mathematician "defeated" a great philosopher by cheating.
Laplace and Lagrange were two French mathematicians in the early19th century. Laplace is great at math, but he is a total villain in politics. Every time the regime changes, he can go to have it both ways without any political integrity. Laplace once dedicated his masterpiece "Celestial Mechanics" to Napoleon. Napoleon wanted to annoy Laplace and accused him of an obvious negligence: "You wrote a book about the world system, but never mentioned the creator of the universe-God."
Laplace retorted, "Your Majesty, I don't need such an assumption."
When Napoleon repeated this sentence to Lagrange, Lagrange said, "Ah, but this hypothesis is very good and explains many problems."
Two prodigies/kloc-at the beginning of the 9th century, two prodigies appeared on both sides of the Atlantic: a British boy Hamilton and an American boy Colborn Hamilton, whose genius was manifested in linguistics. By the age of eight, he had mastered English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. /kloc-At the age of 0/2, he had mastered Persian, Arabic, Malay and Bengali, but he didn't learn Chinese because he didn't have a textbook. Colborn showed a magical genius in mathematics. When I was a child, someone asked him if 4294967297 was a prime number, and he immediately replied no, because it had 64 1 as a divisor. There are countless similar examples, but he can't explain how he came to the correct conclusion.
People brought two prodigies together. This meeting is wonderful. Now it is impossible to know exactly what they talked about, but the result was completely unexpected: Colborn's mathematical talent was completely "transplanted" to Hamilton; Hamilton gave up linguistics and devoted himself to mathematics, becoming the greatest mathematician in Irish history.
As for Colborn, his genius gradually disappeared.
The Death of Mathematicians Abel, a Norwegian mathematician, made great contributions to the development of mathematics at the age of 22, but it was not accepted by the mathematics community at that time. He lived a poor life, which seriously affected his health. He got tuberculosis, which was terminal at that time. In the past few weeks, he has been thinking about the future of his unmarried sister. He wrote to his best friend Kilo: "She is not beautiful, with red hair and freckles, but she is a lovely woman." Although Kilo and Kemp have never met, Abel hopes they can get married.
Miss Kemp took care of Abel at the last moment of her life. At the funeral, she met Kilho who came here specially. Kilo helped her overcome her grief. They fell in love and got married. As Abel hoped, Kilo and Kemp were very happy after their marriage, and they often went to Abel's grave to miss him. As the years passed, they found that more and more people came from all over the world to pay their belated tribute to Abel's contribution to mathematics, and they were just a pair of ordinary pilgrims in this pilgrimage team.
1832 On May 29th, French youth Galois decided to duel with another man for so-called "love and honor". He knows that his opponent's marksmanship is very good, and his hope of winning is very small, and he is likely to die. He asked himself, how did he spend this last night? Before that, he had written two mathematical papers, but both of them were contemptuously rejected by the authorities: one was by Cauchy, a great mathematician; The other time was the sacred French Academy of Sciences, and what was in his mind was valuable. All night, he was in a hurry to write his last words in Science in a fleeting time. Write it as soon as possible before he dies, and try to write out the major events in his rich thoughts. He interrupted from time to time, wrote "I don't have time, I don't have time" in the margin, and then went on to write an extremely scribbled outline.
What he wrote in the last few hours before dawn once and for all found the real answer to a problem that has puzzled mathematicians for centuries, and created an extremely important branch of mathematics-group theory.
The next morning, in a duel, he was shot in the intestines. Before he died, he said to his brother who was crying beside him, "Don't cry, I need enough courage to die at the age of 20." He was buried in the ordinary trench of the cemetery, so today his grave is nowhere to be found. His immortal monument is his work, which consists of two rejected papers and a scribbled manuscript he wrote on the sleepless night before his death.
The mathematician's problem Fermat was a member of parliament in Toulouse, France in the17th century. He was an honest and diligent man and the most outstanding amateur in mathematics in history. In his life, he left many wonderful theorems to future generations; At the same time, due to temporary negligence, it also posed a severe challenge to later mathematicians.
Fermat has a habit. When he reads, he likes to keep his thoughts short. Once, while reading, he wrote the following words: "... it is impossible to divide a power higher than twice into two powers of the same degree." In this regard, I am sure that I have found a wonderful proof, but unfortunately the space here is too small to write down. " This theorem is now named "Fermat's Last Theorem", that is, it is impossible to satisfy xn+yn = Zn, which is Fermat's challenge to future generations. In order to find the proof of this theorem, countless mathematicians in later generations launched a charge again and again, but all failed. 1908, a German rich man offered a reward of 65,438+million marks for the first person to prove Fermat's last theorem completely. Since this theorem was put forward, mathematicians have struggled for more than 300 years and still have not proved it. But this theorem must exist, and Fermat knows it.
Mathematically, Fermat's Last Theorem has become a higher mountain than Mount Everest. Human's mathematical wisdom has only reached such a height once, and has never reached it since.