How about Nicolas Bourbaki?  Mathematicians will of course know why I put the twinkle here.

obiter wrote: None of the above although Gauss is the obvious choice. My vote goes to .... Srinivasa Ramanujan

Ramanujan was certainly unique and outstanding; he was what I would call an "intuitive mathematician".

None of the above although Gauss is the obvious choice. My vote goes to ....

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Lets hear it for Archimedes!       PI ROCKS!

cuncuna wrote: It should be me... I reached places in math that changed the facial expression of my teachers all over the school days...

...wow

NaturalScience wrote: moreitsythanyou wrote: rileydog22 wrote: BaldFriede wrote: Georg Cantor is definitely missing on the list. Bertrand Russel should be on the list too, in my opinion. By the way, Einstein is better known for his contributions to physics, but he had to invent a great part of the mathematics needed for his General Theory of Relativity himself. I must admit though that the beauty of e i *pi + 1 = 0 has never ceased to amaze me. The 5 most important numbers in the world combined into one formula, two of them being irrational, two others the most basic numbers in the world (and the neutral elements of addtion and multiplication), and one the square root of -1. Actually, three of them are irrational.  i cannot be expressed as the quotient of two integers.  Doesn't a number have to be real in order to be considered irrational, though? not sure myself. You are correct.  The irrationals are a subset of the reals, and i is not a real number.

i is NOT an irrational number. Imaginary numbers and real numbers exist side by side, the only difference between them being that the imaginary number is a real number being multiplied with i. For each and every real number there exists an imaginary number and vice versa. And then there are the complex numbers, which consist of a sum of a real number and an imaginary number. A complex number has the form a + b*i, with a and b being real numbers. Interestingly complex numbers can be displayed in a coordinate system, with the real part of the number being the x-coordinate and the imaginary part the y-coordinate (this correlation is arbitrary, by the way, and could as well have been chosen the other way round). (2;3), for example, would mean the complex number 2 + 3*i. Instead of giving the Cartesian coordinates it is often very useful to give the polar coordinates of an imaginary number, which show the distance from the center of the coordinate system and the angle to a certain ray (usually given in radians) when dealing with complex numbers, especially when using roots.

From the list, Euler.

For one of, if not the greatest mathematicians of all time, my recommendation is Henri Lebesgue.

Shakespeare wrote: George Orwell. And I quote, "Two plus two equals five." "No, actually, two plus two equals four."

I don't know why anybody would even bother trying to solve an unsolved question in math (except for the million bucks), as their solution would be doomed to be less awesome than Orwell's elegant proof there. 

George Orwell. And I quote,

"Two plus two equals five."
"No, actually, two plus two equals four."

I gotta go with Euler.  He did so much in a huge variety of fields, from proto-calculus to geometry.