Y5 h/w:'Research a famous mathematician': poster/powerpoint/article- 2 hrs work.. Who?

[ampere]

Can any of you clever lot come up with a suitable mathematician DS can research? He could only think of Isaac Newton, which is OK, but can you think of any others?

[Feenie]

Lewis Carroll - Carroll diagram (data handling). Leave off the drugs references perhaps.

Florence Nightingale - invented the pie chart, I believe.

[Goblinchild]

Fibonacci and his rabbits is fun, Archimedes, Pythagoras and Euclid.
You could get him to do some googling research and pick someone unusual

[LIZS]

Galileo, Pascal, Babbage or the guy who invented binary

[MotherMountainGhost]

Fermat and his last theorem and that geeky-but-sweet Andrew Wiles guy who solved it in the end. There's a good BBC documentary on it.

[RockinSockBunnies]

John Nash (who the film A Beautiful Mind was based on) - very interesting guy, Nobel winner, mental illness, all very interesting.

Benoît B. Mandelbrot - he died last week I believe (heard his obituary on Radio 4) and he seems very interesting too, and there's probably lots on him online and in newspapers right now too.

John von Neumann - Read about him in A Beautiful Mind too. Amazing progidy. Could do insane maths at the age of six.

Hope these are of some help.

[Goblinchild]

Any females yet?
Anyone not Dead White and Male?
Just asking
I struggle with that when planning a topic

[GrimmaTheNome]

Turing, though maybe that would be better for an older child on account of the shameful way he was treated.

Babbage?

[ShatnersBassoon]

I'd go for Ada Lovelace, the First Lady of Nerdery.

[chibi]

ada lovelace

[GrimmaTheNome]

Or Hypatia?

[chibi]

hedy lamarr

neither are pure maths as such, but nevermind

[aJumpedUpPantryBoy]

Robert Recorde - mathematician who invented the equals sign

[Elsaz]

Sophie Germain, 19th century French mathematician. Presumably white and definitely dead, but female

She pretended to be a man in order to study at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

[mrz]

I'm with Goblinchild I love Fabonacci and his rabbits

<a class="break-all" href="http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=www.jimloy.com/algebra/rabbits.gif&imgrefurl=www.jimloy.com/algebra/fibo.htm&h=549&w=386&sz=15&tbnid=pYyDL4P3-INc1M:&tbnh=268&tbnw=188&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfibonacci%2Brabbits&zoom=1&q=fibonacci+rabbits&usg=__4lCqY3yIGmBNg0TwC6iogoc4Uw0=&sa=X&ei=IwbHTN_0OcGS4gayrpSgDw&ved=0CBkQ9QEwAg" rel="nofollow noindex" target="_blank">Fibonacci rabbits

[ProfessorLaytonIsMyZombieSlave]

Émilie du Châtelet if you want a woman.

Mandelbrot or Lagrange or Clifford Cocks for men. Or Serre -- IIRC my mother once got very drunk with him at a party and he wound up sitting in the middle of the floor singing a song about daffodils or something like that, which would make a good central theme for the article...

[GrungeBlobofEctoplasm]

Charles Babbage - first "computer"

Alan Turing - Enigma code

Euclid - geometry

Pythagoras - the theorem

I guess at Year 5 it's got to be kept fairly simple, though

[MegBusset]

Johnny Ball

[ProfessorLaytonIsMyZombieSlave]

Oooh, or Srinivasa Ramanujan, although he has the disadvantage of not having sung any songs about daffodils that I know of...

[Whocantakeasunrise]

Meg you are on my wavelength - I read the post and my first answer was Johnny Ball - none of these other people 'taught' us maths

[southeastastra]

yeah johnny ball. shouldn't the year 5 pupil be doing this research themselves? rather than asking on here :S

[Feenie]

I don't think asking for suggestions for people to search is necessarily doing the work for them.

[southeastastra]

don't you? i do especially as some of these are very obscure

[RustyBear]

I used to have hamsters called Fermat and Fibonacci....

[Feenie]

But the actual research would be finding out all about them and presenting it as a poster/powerpoint, etc. Lots of work there.