I don't want to diminish Galois' reputation, Lurid, but a very great deal of pure mathematics existed before 1830. Nobel never married, astrojax, which of course doesn't mean the legend's untrue. It's probably untrue though.
One admirable thing I remember about the Royal Society is that they managed to make the Oliver Heaviside a fellow. Heaviside was one of the most important scientists of the late nineteenth century - among other things he put Maxwell's equations into there present form, and he constructed a formulism, the operational calculus, that allowed many important differential equations, such as the "telegrapher's equation," to be solved using irregular inputs such as the step and delta functions - but he was a difficult man, working class and, having left school at 16, an autodidact as far a science was concerned, with a chip on his shoulder and a bitter temper. A prototypical mad scientist in fact. If I remember rightly Lord Kelvin insisted they acknowledge his contributions, which wasn't obvious in the 1890's. I'm all for mad scientists.
I vote for Archimedes, specifically his integration of the circle (using the limit of a sum of the areas of an unlimited number of increasingly narrow covering triangles) as the most significant event in the history of science, but only because the invention of the wheel was prehistoric. |
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