Examples of Mathematicians who excelled in Pure and Applied Mathematics

Question

The other day I was thinking about mathematicians in history who made fundamental contributions to both pure and applied mathematics. The examples I can think of are Newton, Gauss, Euler, Archimedes and von Neumann (I suppose you could include John Nash).

I was wondering if there were any other examples of mathematicians who excelled in their contributions to both pure and applied mathematics.

Edit: I just read a paper 'Influence of atmospheric pressure on the phenomena accompanying the entry of spheres into water' by Gilbarg and Anderson and realised that it was the same Gilbarg that wrote the elliptic PDEs textbook with Trudinger (in this case, you could even class the paper as applied physics).

A great example is John von Neumann, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann — Fabrice Baudoin, Nov 09 '19 at 17:01
Thanks, I did mention John von Neumann in my post though, but he is a great example. — Hollis Williams, Nov 09 '19 at 17:03
Sorry, I did not see. I will go for Henri Poincare then, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincaré — Fabrice Baudoin, Nov 09 '19 at 17:08
I am not much fond of distinction between pure and applied mathematics, but I guess Kolmogorov would be another example. — Algernon, Nov 09 '19 at 17:12
I'd be more interested in contemporary mathematicians who excel at both. Harder to do it today than before. Terry Tao comes to mind. — , Nov 09 '19 at 17:42
Kolmogorov? As a little part, he was involved in composing ballistic tables during WWII... — Ilya Bogdanov, Nov 09 '19 at 21:05
I think the question is written is a far too much opinion-based way (which is even worse if one includes contemporary mathematicians). — YCor, Jan 10 '20 at 17:06

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 09 '19 at 19:54

2

I think David Mumford qualifies.

answered Nov 09 '19 at 19:54

Joseph Malkevitch

1,713

I didn't think of Mumford, but interesting suggestion. – Hollis Williams Nov 09 '19 at 20:01

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 09 '19 at 21:15

2

A further example would be Eduard Stiefel.

answered Nov 09 '19 at 21:15

Frank

457

I didn't realise that Stiefel created the conjugate gradient method, that's interesting. – Hollis Williams Nov 09 '19 at 22:04

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 09 '19 at 17:39

1

Very partial list: Fourier, Turing, Peter Lax, Noga Alon, Cathleen Morawetz, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olga_Ladyzhenskaya, Jurgen Moser,

answered Nov 09 '19 at 17:39

Yuval Peres

13,995

I sort of think of Ladyzhenskaya as a pure mathematician working on rigorous fluid dynamics, also what applied work did Moser do? – Hollis Williams Nov 09 '19 at 17:46
I haven't heard of some of these before, but these are good examples, thanks for posting. – Hollis Williams Nov 09 '19 at 18:33
I think of rigorous fluid dynamics and even KAM theory as applied Math. – Yuval Peres Nov 09 '19 at 18:48

Alexandre Eremenko · Answer 4 · 2020-01-10T16:01:53.530

1

Examples? Almost all great mathematicians before the middle of 19th century, beginning from Euclid (who wrote not only the Elements but also a book on Optics and another on Astronomy): Archimedes, Apollonius (who introduced epicycles to Astronomy), Hero, Ptolemy,...,Kepler, Napier,..., Huygens, Newton,..., Euler, Gauss (who spent most of his career doing geodesy, astronomy, magnetism, and also invented telegraph), Cauchy, Lagrange, Jacobi, Riemann (contributions to electrostatics, ellasticity and PDE),..., Klein (his great book on spinning tops), Poincare (celestial mechanics),..., and very many 20 century mathematicians: Fatou, Weyl, Littlewood, Vladimir Arnold, Atiyah, Donald Knuth, and even Hardy (who boasted that he is a pure mathematician:-) ... too many of them to make a list of reasonable length.

I would say that before 1850, a great mathematician who DID NOT contribute to applied mathematics is a rarity.

edited Jan 10 '20 at 16:01

answered Nov 09 '19 at 20:10

Alexandre Eremenko

88,753

I don't really agree with this list. I asked for people who excelled in applied mathematics as well. Riemann did not make substantial contributions to applied mathematics, nor did Klein. Also Atiyah made contributions to theoretical physics, but not sure I would class him as an applied mathematician. Knuth is mainly a computer scientist and cannot be classed as having made substantial achievements in pure mathematics. Hardy did very little applied mathematics. – Hollis Williams Nov 09 '19 at 21:02
Also some of the ancient examples such as Hero, that seems a stretch to say that they made fundamental contributions to pure mathematics, especially when many of their works have been lost. Again, Weyl did work on theoretical physics, but I class this as a separate subject and not as applied mathematics, – Hollis Williams Nov 09 '19 at 21:05
2

@Tom "Knuth cannot be classed as having made substantial achievements in pure mathematics" --- I strongly disagree. – Fedor Petrov Nov 09 '19 at 21:46
@Tom: before arguing, why you just don't look what all these named people did? Also define "applied mathematics" if you don't want to include mathematical physics. – Alexandre Eremenko Nov 10 '19 at 01:30
@Tom: "Riemann did not make substantial contribution to applied mathematics..." Are you joking? Look at his Complete papers! And this does not include the standard textbook on PDE which he wrote with Weber. – Alexandre Eremenko Jan 10 '20 at 15:53
Ah yes, that was my mistake, I'm not sure why I said that as I know he did a lot of work on applied mathematics and mathematical physics. – Hollis Williams Jan 11 '20 at 14:32

Examples of Mathematicians who excelled in Pure and Applied Mathematics

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