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?

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

Florence Nightingale - invented the pie chart, I believe.

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

Galileo, Pascal, Babbage or the guy who invented binary

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.

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.

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

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

Babbage?

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

ada lovelace

Or Hypatia?

hedy lamarr

neither are pure maths as such, but nevermind

Robert Recorde - mathematician who invented the equals sign

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.

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" target="_blank">Fibonacci rabbits

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...

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

Johnny Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

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