Asteroids named after mathematicians
This evening I stumbled on the fact that John von Neumann and Fibonacci both have asteroids named after them. Then I wondered how many more famous mathematicians have asteroids named after them. As it turns out, most of them: Euclid, Gauss, Cauchy, Noether, Gidel, Ramanujan, " It's easier to look at the names that are not assigned to asteroids.
I wrote a little script to search for the 100 greatest mathematicians (according to James Allen's list) and look for names missing from a list of named asteroids. Here are the ones that were missing, in order of Allen's list.
- Alexandre Grothendieck
- Hermann K. H. Weyl
- Brahmagupta
- Aryabhata
- Apollonius
- Carl Ludwig Siegel
- Diophantus
- Muhammed al-Khowarizmi
- Bhascara (II) Acharya
- Alhazen ibn al-Haytham
- Andrey N. Kolmogorov
- Eudoxus
- Panini
- Jakob Steiner
- Hermann G. Grassmann
- M. E. Camille Jordan
- Jean-Pierre Serre
- Michael F. Atiyah
- Atle Selberg
- Pappus
So of the top 100 list of mathematicians, 80 have asteroids named after them and the 20 above do not.
Alexandre Grothendieck, is the greatest mathematician-11th on James Allen's list-not to have an asteroid named in his honor.