[FOM] Interesting book

[Harvey Friedman]

FOR YOUR NEW YEAR'S AMUSEMENT ONLY!!

Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray.

Here are some selected entries from an Appendix, which lists "significant
figures" in mathematicians, (roughly) based on pre 1950 work, where the
numbers indicated the degree of significance, scaled down from 100,
according to a purely historical study by the author.

It does purport to indicate what *history is (currently) valuing*.

Of course, some of the numbers look ridiculous, as to be expected.

Murray also does this for many other fields, including physics, astronomy,
Western music, Western philosophy, etc.

NOTE: Some of the first names differ from what I normally see, but I did not
correct this author, giving him some benefit of the doubt.

As mathematicians:

Archimedes  33
Emil Artin  2
Bernoulli, Daniel  6
  Jakob  41
  Johann  19
  Nikolaus  5
Birkhoff, George  6
Bolyai, Janos  15
Boole, George  20
Borel, Felix  8
Bourbaki, Nicolas  6
Brouwer, Luitzen  18
Cantor, Georg  50
Cardano, Girolamo  37
Cauchy, Augustin  34
Cavalieri, Francesco  22
Cayley, Arthur  32
Cramer, Gabriel  6
d'Alembert, Jean  8
De Morgan, Augustus  7
Dedekind, Richard  23
Desargues, Girard  19
Descartes, Rene  53
Dickson, Leonard  2
Diophantus of Alexandria  39
Dirichlet, Gustav  13
Euclid of Alexandria  81
Euler, Leonhard  100
Fermat, Pierre de  72
Fibonacci, Leonardo  33
Fourier, Jean  24
Frechet, Rene  15
Frobenius, Georg  3
Galois, Evariste  15
Gauss, Carl  81
Gelfond, Aleksander  7
Godel, Kurt  18
Grassmann, Hermann  20
Gregory, James  23
Hadamard, Jacques  11
Hamilton, William  28
Hardy, Geoffrey  7
Hausdorff, Felix  6
Hilbert, David  40
Huygens, Christiaan  21
Jacobi, Carl  17
Jordan, Marie  11
Khayyam, Omar  13
Klein, Christian  22
Kolmogorov, Andrey  4
Kovalevkaya, Sonya  8
Kronecker, Ernst  7
Kummer, Ernst  7
L'Hospital, Guillaume de  9
Lagrange, Joseph  30
Lambert, Johann  15
Laplace, Pierre  17
Lebesgue, Henri  10
Legendre, Adrien  37
Leibniz, Gottfried  70
Lie, Marius  10
lindemann, Carl von  11
Liouville, Joseph  13
Lobachevsky, Nikolay  19
Maclaurin, Colin  27
Markov, Andrei  7
Minkowski, Hermann  11
Mobius, August  10
Moivre, Abraham de  18
Monge, Gaspard  27
Morgenstern, Oskar  7
Napier, John  19
Newton, Issac  87
Noerther, Emmy  10
Oresme, Nicole  26
Pascal, Blaise  47
Peano, Guiseppe  24
Plucker, Julius  11
Poincare, Julius  28
Poisson, Simeon  12
Poncelet, Jean  26
Ptolemy  28
Pythagoras of Samos  23
Ramanujan, Srinivasa  7
Riemann, Bernhard  47
Rolle, Michael  3
Russell, Bertrand  15
Stevin, Simon  20
Stirling, James  3
Sylvester, James  9
Tartaglia (Fontana)  32
Taylor, Brook  16
Tchebycheff, Pafnuty  4
Vallee-Poussin, Charles de la  6
Vandermonde, Alexandre  1
Venn, John  1
Viete, Francois  36
Volterra, Vito  5
Von Neumann, John  19
Waerden, B.L. van der  4
Wallis, John 35
Weddenburn, Joseph  1
Weierstrass, Karl  20
Weyl, Hermann 7
Whitehead, Alfred  11
Weiner, Nobert  1
Zeno of Elea  2
Zermelo, Ernst  6

I also mention the numbers regarding a "rivalry" in the philosophy community
between Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Russell appearing above on
the Math list also):

As philosophers:

Bertrand Russell  18
Lugwig Wittgenstein  13

Harvey Friedman