A geometer or geometrician is a mathematician who specializes in geometry. Some notable geometers and their main fields of work, chronologically listed, are:
1000 BC to 1 BC
Baudhayana (fl. c. 800 BC) – Euclidean geometry Manava (c. 750 BC–690 BC) – Euclidean geometry Thales of Miletus (c. 624 BC – c. 546 BC) – Euclidean geometry Pythagoras (c. 570 BC – c. 495 BC) – Euclidean geometry, Pythagorean theorem Zeno of Elea (c. 490 BC – c. 430 BC) – Euclidean geometry Hippocrates of Chios (born c. 470 – 410 BC) – first systematically organized Stoicheia – Elements (geometry textbook) Mozi (c. 468 BC – c. 391 BC) Plato (427–347 BC) Theaetetus (c. 417 BC – 369 BC) Autolycus of Pitane (360–c. 290 BC) – astronomy, spherical geometry Euclid (fl. 300 BC) – Elements, Euclidean geometry (sometimes called the "father of geometry") Apollonius of Perga (c. 262 BC – c. 190 BC) – Euclidean geometry, conic sections Archimedes (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) – Euclidean geometry Eratosthenes (c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC) – Euclidean geometry Katyayana (c. 3rd century BC) – Euclidean geometry
1–1300 AD Hero of Alexandria (c. AD 10–70) – Euclidean geometry Pappus of Alexandria (c. AD 290–c. 350) – Euclidean geometry, projective geometry Hypatia of Alexandria (c. AD 370–c. 415) – Euclidean geometry Brahmagupta (597–668) – Euclidean geometry, cyclic quadrilaterals Vergilius of Salzburg (c.700–784) – Irish bishop of Aghaboe, Ossory and later Salzburg, Austria; antipodes, and astronomy Al-Abbās ibn Said al-Jawharī (c. 800–c. 860) Thabit ibn Qurra (826–901) – analytic geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, conic sections Abu'l-Wáfa (940–998) – spherical geometry, spherical triangles Ibn al-Haytham (965–c. 1040) Omar Khayyam (1048–1131) – algebraic geometry, conic sections Ibn Maḍāʾ (1116–1196)
1301–1800 AD
Piero della Francesca (1415–1492) Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) – Euclidean geometry Jyesthadeva (c. 1500 – c. 1610) – Euclidean geometry, cyclic quadrilaterals Marin Getaldić (1568–1626) Jacques-François Le Poivre (1652–1710) – projective geometry Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) – (used geometric ideas in astronomical work) Edmund Gunter (1581–1686) Girard Desargues (1591–1661) – projective geometry; Desargues' theorem René Descartes (1596–1650) – invented the methodology of analytic geometry, also called Cartesian geometry after him Pierre de Fermat (1607–1665) – analytic geometry Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) – projective geometry Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) – evolute Giordano Vitale (1633–1711) Philippe de La Hire (1640–1718) – projective geometry Isaac Newton (1642–1727) – 3rd-degree algebraic curve Giovanni Ceva (1647–1734) – Euclidean geometry Johann Jacob Heber (1666–1727) – surveyor and geometer Giovanni Gerolamo Saccheri (1667–1733) – non-Euclidean geometry Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) Tobias Mayer (1723–1762) Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) – non-Euclidean geometry Gaspard Monge (1746–1818) – descriptive geometry John Playfair (1748–1819) – Euclidean geometry Lazare Nicolas Marguerite Carnot (1753–1823) – projective geometry Joseph Diaz Gergonne (1771–1859) – projective geometry; Gergonne point Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) – Theorema Egregium Louis Poinsot (1777–1859) Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) Jean-Victor Poncelet (1788–1867) – projective geometry Augustin-Louis Cauchy (1789–1857) August Ferdinand Möbius (1790–1868) – Euclidean geometry Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856) – hyperbolic geometry, a non-Euclidean geometry Michel Chasles (1793–1880) – projective geometry Germinal Dandelin (1794–1847) – Dandelin spheres in conic sections Jakob Steiner (1796–1863) – champion of synthetic geometry methodology, projective geometry, Euclidean geometry
1801–1900 AD
Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach (1800–1834) – Euclidean geometry Julius Plücker (1801–1868) János Bolyai (1802–1860) – hyperbolic geometry, a non-Euclidean geometry Christian Heinrich von Nagel (1803–1882) – Euclidean geometry Johann Benedict Listing (1808–1882) – topology Hermann Günther Grassmann (1809–1877) – exterior algebra Ludwig Otto Hesse (1811–1874) – algebraic invariants and geometry Ludwig Schlafli (1814–1895) – Regular 4-polytope Pierre Ossian Bonnet (1819–1892) – differential geometry Arthur Cayley (1821–1895) Joseph Bertrand (1822–1900) Delfino Codazzi (1824–1873) – differential geometry Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) – elliptic geometry (a non-Euclidean geometry) and Riemannian geometry Julius Wilhelm Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) Ludwig Burmester (1840–1927) – theory of linkages Edmund Hess (1843–1903) Albert Victor Bäcklund (1845–1922) Max Noether (1844–1921) – algebraic geometry Henri Brocard (1845–1922) – Brocard points William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) – geometric algebra Pieter Hendrik Schoute (1846–1923) Felix Klein (1849–1925) Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya (1850–1891) Evgraf Fedorov (1853–1919) Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) Luigi Bianchi (1856–1928) – differential geometry Alicia Boole Stott (1860–1940) Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) – non-Euclidean geometry Henry Frederick Baker (1866–1956) – algebraic geometry Élie Cartan (1869–1951) Dmitri Egorov (1869–1931) – differential geometry Veniamin Kagan (1869–1953) Raoul Bricard (1870–1944) – descriptive geometry Ernst Steinitz (1871–1928) – Steinitz's theorem Marcel Grossmann (1878–1936) Oswald Veblen (1880–1960) – projective geometry, differential geometry Nathan Altshiller Court (1881–1968) – author of College Geometry Emmy Noether (1882–1935) – algebraic topology Harry Clinton Gossard (1884–1954) Arthur Rosenthal (1887–1959) Helmut Hasse (1898–1979) – algebraic geometry
1901–present
William Vallance Douglas Hodge (1903–1975) Patrick du Val (1903–1987) Beniamino Segre (1903–1977) – combinatorial geometry J. C. P. Miller (1906–1981) André Weil (1906–1998) – Algebraic geometry H. S. M. Coxeter (1907–2003) – theory of polytopes, non-Euclidean geometry, projective geometry J. A. Todd (1908–1994) Daniel Pedoe (1910–1998) Shiing-Shen Chern (1911–2004) – differential geometry Ernst Witt (1911–1991) Rafael Artzy (1912–2006) Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov (1912–1999) László Fejes Tóth (1915–2005) Edwin Evariste Moise (1918–1998) Aleksei Pogorelov (1919–2002) – differential geometry Magnus Wenninger (1919–2017) – polyhedron models Jean-Louis Koszul (1921–2018) Isaak Yaglom (1921–1988) Eugenio Calabi (1923–2023) Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) – fractal geometry Katsumi Nomizu (1924–2008) – affine differential geometry Michael S. Longuet-Higgins (1925–2016) John Leech (1926–1992) Alexander Grothendieck (1928–2014) – algebraic geometry Branko Grünbaum (1929–2018) – discrete geometry Michael Atiyah (1929–2019) Lev Semenovich Pontryagin (1908–1988) Geoffrey Colin Shephard (1927–2016) Norman W. Johnson (1930–2017) John Milnor (1931–) Roger Penrose (1931–) Yuri Manin (1937–2023) – algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry Vladimir Arnold (1937–2010) – algebraic geometry Ernest Vinberg (1937–2020) J. H. Conway (1937–2020) – sphere packing, recreational geometry Robin Hartshorne (1938–) – geometry, algebraic geometry Phillip Griffiths (1938–) – algebraic geometry, differential geometry Enrico Bombieri (1940–) – algebraic geometry Robert Williams (1942–) Peter McMullen (1942–) Richard S. Hamilton (1943–2024) – differential geometry, Ricci flow, Poincaré conjecture Mikhail Gromov (1943–) Rudy Rucker (1946–) William Thurston (1946–2012) Shing-Tung Yau (1949–) Michael Freedman (1951–) Egon Schulte (1955–) – polytopes George W. Hart (1955–) – sculptor Károly Bezdek (1955–) – discrete geometry, sphere packing, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry Simon Donaldson (1957–) Kenji Fukaya (1959–) – symplectic geometry Yong-Geun Oh (1961–) Toshiyuki Kobayashi (1962–) Hiraku Nakajima (1962–) – representation theory and geometry Hwang Jun-Muk (1963–) – algebraic geometry, differential geometry Grigori Perelman (1966–) – Poincaré conjecture Maryam Mirzakhani (1977–2017) Denis Auroux (1977–)
Geometers in art
See also Mathematics and architecture
References