Ever use the Desmos classroom activities in your math class? If not, you might want to check them out, especially the Polygraph activities and the marbleslides. One feature of Desmos classroom activities is that you can anonymize your students by giving them randomly assigned mathematician names. Although I recognized some of the names and knew a bit about their contributions to mathematics, there were quite a few mathematicians I didn’t even recognize. So this is my attempt to record the names, and find out more about them and their contributions to mathematics. Of course, you might have your students find the biographies for you… Here’s the list of the mathematicians:
Johann Bernoulli
George Birkhoff
Georg Cantor
Arthur Cayley
Jose Adem Chain
Émilie du Châtelet
Diophantus
Peter Dirichlet
Gotthold Eisenstein
Pierre de Fermat
Jacqueline Ferrand
Joseph Fourier
Galileo Galilei
Carl F. Gauss
Godfrey Hardy
Euphemia
Lofton Haynes
Charles Hermite
Katherine Johnson
Sophus Lie
Maryam Mirzakhani
Cathleen Morawetz
Emmy Noether
Henri Poincaré
Julia Robinson
Diego Rodriguez
Bertrand Russell
Marjorie Senechal
Jean-Pierre Serre
Alfred Tarski
Olga Taussky-Todd
Jean Taylor
Karen Uhlenbeck
Andrew Wiles
Dorothy Vaughan
Shing-Tung Yau