1

George Boole (2 November 1815 8 December 1864) was an English mathematician and philosopher.
As the inventor of Boolean logicthe basis of modern digital computer logicBoole is regarded in hindsight as a founder of the field of computer science. Boole said, ... no general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognise ... those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning ... George Boole's father, John Boole (17791848), was a tradesman of limited means, but of "studious character and active mind". Being especially interested in mathematical science and logic, the father gave his son his first lessons; but the extraordinary mathematical talents of George Boole did not manifest themselves in early life. At first, his favorite subject was classics. By his teens, he had learned Latin, Greek, German, Italian, and French. With these languages, he was able to read a wide variety of Christian theology. Combining his interests in mathematics and theology, he compared the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost with the three dimensions of space, and was attracted to the Hebrew conception of God as an absolute unity. Boole considered converting to Judaism but in the end chose Unitarianism. Boole's House and School in Lincoln It was not until his successful establishment of a school at Lincoln, its removal to Waddington, and later his appointment in 1849 as the first professor of mathematics of then Queen's College, Cork in Ireland (now University College Cork, where the library, underground lecture theatre complex and the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics[3] are named in his honour) that his mathematical skills were fully realized. In 1855 he married Mary Everest (niece of George Everest), who later, as Mrs. Boole, wrote several useful educational works on her husband's principles. Though Boole published little except his mathematical and logical works, his acquaintance with general literature was wide and deep. Dante was his favourite poet, and he preferred the Paradiso to the Inferno. The metaphysics of Aristotle, the ethics of Spinoza, the philosophical works of Cicero, and many kindred works, were also frequent subjects of study. His reflections upon scientific, philosophical and religious questions are contained in four addresses upon The Genius of Sir Isaac Newton, The Right Use of Leisure, The Claims of Science and The Social Aspect of Intellectual Culture, which he delivered and printed at different times. The personal character of Boole inspired all his friends with the deepest esteem. He was marked by true modesty, and his life was given to the single-minded pursuit of truth. Though he received a medal from the Royal Society for his memoir of 1844, and the honorary degree of LL.D. from the University of Dublin, he neither sought nor received the ordinary rewards to which his discoveries would entitle him. On 8 December 1864, in the full vigour of his intellectual powers, he died of an attack of fever, ending in pleural effusion, an accumulation of fluid around the lungs. He is buried in the Church of Ireland cemetery of St Michael's, Church Road, Blackrock (a suburb of Cork City). There is a commemorative plaque inside the adjoining church. WORK To the broader public Boole was known only as the author of numerous abstruse papers on mathematical topics, and of three or four distinct publications that have become standard works. His earliest published paper was the "Researches in the theory of analytical transformations, with a special application to the reduction of the general equation of the second order." printed in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal in February 1840 (Volume 2, no. 8, pp. 6473), and it led to a friendship between Boole and D.F. Gregory, the editor of the journal, which lasted until the premature death of the latter in 1844. A long list of Boole's memoirs and detached papers, both on logical and mathematical topics, are found in the Catalogue of Scientific Memoirs published by the Royal Society, and in the supplementary volume on Differential Equations, edited by Isaac Todhunter. To the Cambridge Mathematical Journal and its successor, the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, Boole contributed twenty-two articles in all. In the third and fourth series of the Philosophical Magazine are found sixteen papers. The Royal Society

2 printed six important memoirs in the Philosophical Transactions, and a few other memoirs are to be found in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Royal Irish Academy, in the Bulletin de l'Acadmie de St-Ptersbourg for 1862 (under the name G Boldt, vol. iv. pp. 198215), and in Crelle's Journal. Also included is a paper on the mathematical basis of logic, published in the Mechanic's Magazine in 1848. The works of Boole are thus contained in about fifty scattered articles and a few separate publications.In 1848 Boole published The Mathematical Analysis of Logic the first of his contribution to symbolic logic. Only two systematic treatises on mathematical subjects were completed by Boole during his lifetime. The wellknown Treatise on Differential Equations appeared in 1859, and was followed, the next year, by a Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences, designed to serve as a sequel to the former work. These treatises are valuable contributions to the important branches of mathematics in question. To a certain extent these works embody the more important discoveries of their author. In the sixteenth and seventeenth chapters of the Differential Equations we find, for instance, an account of the general symbolic method, the bold and skilful employment of which led to Boole's chief discoveries, and of a general method in analysis, originally described in his famous memoir printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1844. Boole was one of the most eminent of those who perceived that the symbols of operation could be separated from those of quantity and treated as distinct objects of calculation. His principal characteristic was perfect confidence in any result obtained by the treatment of symbols in accordance with their primary laws and conditions, and an almost unrivaled skill and power in tracing out these results. During the last few years of his life Boole was constantly engaged in extending his researches with the object of producing a second edition of his Differential Equations much more complete than the first edition, and part of his last vacation was spent in the libraries of the Royal Society and the British Museum; but this new edition was never completed. Even the manuscripts left at his death were so incomplete that Todhunter, into whose hands they were put, found it impossible to use them in the publication of a second edition of the original treatise, and printed them, in 1865, in a supplementary volume. With the exception of Augustus De Morgan, Boole was probably the first English mathematician since the time of John Wallis who had also written upon logic. His novel views of logical method were due to the same profound confidence in symbolic reasoning to which he had successfully trusted in mathematical investigation. Speculations concerning a calculus of reasoning had at different times occupied Boole's thoughts, but it was not till the spring of 1847 that he put his ideas into the pamphlet called Mathematical Analysis of Logic. Boole afterward regarded this as a hasty and imperfect exposition of his logical system, and he desired that his much larger work, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, should alone be considered as containing a mature statement of his views. This ushered in a new focus on the nature of evidence, argument, and proof. Nevertheless, there is a charm of originality about his earlier logical work that is easy to appreciate. He did not regard logic as a branch of mathematics, as the title of his earlier pamphlet might be taken to imply, but he pointed out such a deep analogy between the symbols of algebra and those that can be made, in his opinion, to represent logical forms and syllogisms, that we can hardly help saying that (especially his) formal logic is mathematics restricted to the two quantities, 0 and 1. By unity Boole denoted the universe of thinkable objects; literal symbols, such as x, y, z, v, u, etc., were used with the elective meaning attaching to common adjectives and substantives. Thus, if x = horned and y = sheep, then the successive acts of election represented by x and y, if performed on unity, give the whole of the class horned sheep. Boole showed that elective symbols of this kind obey the same primary laws of combination as algebraic symbols, whence it followed that they could be added, subtracted, multiplied and even divided, almost exactly in the same manner as numbers. Thus, (1 x) would represent the operation of selecting all things in the world except horned things, that is, all not horned things, and (1 x) (1 y) would give us all things neither horned nor sheep. By the use of such symbols propositions could be reduced to the form of equations, and the syllogistic conclusion from two premises was obtained by eliminating the middle term according to ordinary algebraic rules. Still more original and remarkable, however, was that part of his system, fully stated in his Laws of Thought, formed a general symbolic method of logical inference. Given any propositions involving any number of terms, Boole showed how, by the purely symbolic treatment of the premises, to draw any conclusion logically contained in those premises. The second part of the Laws of Thought contained a corresponding attempt to discover a general

3 method in probabilities, which should enable us from the given probabilities of any system of events to determine the consequent probability of any other event logically connected with the given events. In 1921 the economist John Maynard Keynes published a book that has become a classic on probability theory, "A Treatise of Probability." Keynes's comments about Boole's theory of probability were generally taken to be the definitive statement on the subject. Keynes believed that Boole had made a fundamental error that vitiated much of his analysis.[4] In a recent book, "The Last Challenge Problem," David Miller provides a general method in accord with Boole's system, and attempts to solve the problems recognized earlier by Keynes and others.[5] Boole proposed that logical propositions should be expressed as algebraic equations. The algebraic manipulation of the symbols in the equations provides a fail-safe method of logical deduction, i.e. logic is reduced to algebra. Boole replaced the operation of multiplication by the word 'and' and addition by the word 'or'. The symbols in the equations can stand for collections of objects (sets) or statements in logic. For example, if x is the set of all brown cows and y is the set of all fat cows, then x+y is the set of all cows that are brown or fat, and xy is the set of all cows that are brown and fat. Let z = the set of all Irish cows. Then z(x+y) = zx+zy; in other words 'the set of Irish cows that are either brown or fat is the same as the collection of cows that are Irish and brown or Irish and fat'.

Karl Pearson FRS

(27 March 1857 27 April 1936[2]) was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.[3] In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London. He was a proponent of eugenics, and a protg and biographer of Sir Francis Galton. A sesquicentenary conference was held in London on 23 March 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth EDUCATION & EARLY WORK Karl Pearson was educated privately at University College School, after which he went to King's College, Cambridge in 1876 to study mathematics,[7] graduating in 1879 as Third Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos. He then travelled to Germany to study physics at the University of Heidelberg under G H Quincke and metaphysics under Kuno Fischer. He next visited the University of Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the famous physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond on Darwinism (Emil was a brother of Paul du Bois-Reymond, the mathematician). Other subjects which he studied in Berlin included Roman Law, taught by Bruns and Mommsen, medieval and 16th century German Literature, and Socialism. He was strongly influenced by the courses he attended at this time and he became sufficiently expert on German literature that he was offered a Germanics post at Kings College, Cambridge. On returning to England in 1880, Pearson first went to Cambridge: Back in Cambridge, I worked in the engineering shops, but drew up the schedule in Mittel- and Althochdeutsch for the Medieval Languages Tripos.

[1]

4 In his first book, The New Werther, Pearson gives a clear indication of why he studied so many diverse subjects: I rush from science to philosophy, and from philosophy to our old friends the poets; and then, over-wearied by too much idealism, I fancy I become practical in returning to science. Have you ever attempted to conceive all there is in the world worth knowing that not one subject in the universe is unworthy of study? The giants of literature, the mysteries of many-dimensional space, the attempts of Boltzmann and Crookes to penetrate Nature's very laboratory, the Kantian theory of the universe, and the latest discoveries in embryology, with their wonderful tales of the development of life what an immensity beyond our grasp! Mankind seems on the verge of a new and glorious discovery. What Newton did to simplify the planetary motions must now be done to unite in one whole the various isolated theories of mathematical physics. Pearson then returned to London to study law so that he might, like his father, be called to the Bar. Quoting Pearson's own account: Coming to London, I read in chambers in Lincoln's Inn, drew up bills of sale, and was called to the Bar, but varied legal studies by lecturing on heat at Barnes, on Martin Luther at Hampstead, and on Lasalle and Marx on Sundays at revolutionary clubs around Soho. His next career move was to Inner Temple, where he read law until 1881 (although he never practised). After this, he returned to mathematics, deputizing for the mathematics professor at King's College London in 1881 and for the professor at University College London in 1883. In 1884, he was appointed to the Goldsmid Chair of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at University College London. Pearson became the editor of Common Sense and the Exact Sciences (1885) when William Kingdon Clifford passed on. 1891 saw him also appointed to the professorship of Geometry at Gresham College; here he met Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, a zoologist who had some interesting problems requiring quantitative solutions. The collaboration, in biometry and evolutionary theory, was a fruitful one and lasted until Weldon died in 1906. Weldon introduced Pearson to Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, who was interested in aspects of evolution such as heredity and eugenics. Pearson became Galton's protg his "statistical heir" as some have put it at times to the verge of hero worship. After Galton's death in 1911, Pearson embarked on producing his definitive biographya three-volume tome of narrative, letters, genealogies, commentaries, and photographspublished in 1914, 1924, and 1930, with much of Pearson's own financing paying for their print runs. The biography, done "to satisfy myself and without regard to traditional standards, to the needs of publishers or to the tastes of the reading public", triumphed Galton's life, work, and personal heredity. He predicted that Galton, rather than Charles Darwin, would be remembered as the most prodigious grandson of Erasmus Darwin. When Galton died, he left the residue of his estate to the University of London for a Chair in Eugenics. Pearson was the first holder of this chairthe Galton Chair of Eugenics, later the Galton Chair of Genetics[8]in accordance with Galton's wishes. He formed the Department of Applied Statistics (with financial support from the Drapers' Company), into which he incorporated the Biometric and Galton laboratories. He remained with the department until his retirement in 1933, and continued to work until his death in 1936. [edit] Einstein and Pearson's work When the 23 year-old Albert Einstein started a study group, the Olympia Academy, with his two younger friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, he suggested that the first book to be read was Pearson's The Grammar of Science. This book covered several themes that were later to become part of the theories of Einstein and other scientists. Pearson asserted that the laws of nature are relative to the perceptive ability of the observer. Irreversibility of natural processes, he claimed, is a purely relative conception. An observer who travels at the exact velocity of light would see an eternal now, or an absence of motion. He speculated that an observer who traveled faster than light would see time reversal, similar to a cinema film being run backwards. Pearson also discussed antimatter, the fourth dimension, and wrinkles in time. Pearson's relativity was based on idealism, in the sense of ideas or pictures in a mind. "There are many signs," he wrote, "that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older physicists." (Preface to 2nd Ed., The Grammar of Science) Further, he stated, "...science is in reality a

5 classification and analysis of the contents of the mind...." "In truth, the field of science is much more consciousness than an external world." (Ibid., Ch. II, 6) "Law in the scientific sense is thus essentially a product of the human mind and has no meaning apart from man."

Apollonius of Perga [Pergaeus] (Ancient Greek: ) (ca. 262 BC ca. 190 BC) was a Greek
geometer and astronomer noted for his writings on conic sections. His innovative methodology and terminology, especially in the field of conics, influenced many later scholars including Ptolemy, Francesco Maurolico, Isaac Newton, and Ren Descartes. It was Apollonius who gave the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola the names by which we know them. The hypothesis of eccentric orbits, or equivalently, deferent and epicycles, to explain the apparent motion of the planets and the varying speed of the Moon, is also attributed to him. Apollonius' theorem demonstrates that the two models are equivalent given the right parameters. Ptolemy describes this theorem in the Almagest XII.1. Apollonius also researched the lunar history, for which he is said to have been called Epsilon (). The crater Apollonius on the Moon is named in his honor Conics-The degree of originality of the Conics can best be judged from Apollonius's own prefaces. Books iiv he describes as an "elementary introduction" containing essential principles, while the other books are specialized investigations in particular directions. He then claims that, in Books iiv, he only works out the generation of the curves and their fundamental properties presented in Book i more fully and generally than did earlier treatises, and that a number of theorems in Book iii and the greater part of Book iv are new. Allusions to predecessor's works, such as Euclid's four Books on Conics, show a debt not only to Euclid but also to Conon and Nicoteles. The generality of Apollonius's treatment is indeed remarkable. He defines the fundamental conic property as the equivalent of the Cartesian equation applied to oblique axesi.e., axes consisting of a diameter and the tangent at its extremitythat are obtained by cutting an oblique circular cone. The way the cone is cut does not matter. He shows that the oblique axes are only a particular case after demonstrating that the basic conic property can be expressed in the same form with reference to any new diameter and the tangent at its extremity. It is the form of the fundamental property (expressed in terms of the "application of areas") that leads him to give these curves their names: parabola, ellipse, and hyperbola. Thus Books vvii are clearly original. Apollonius's genius reaches its highest heights in Book v. Here he treats of normals as minimum and maximum straight lines drawn from given points to the curve (independently of tangent properties); discusses how many normals can be drawn from particular points; finds their feet by construction; and gives propositions that both determine the center of curvature at any point and lead at once to the Cartesian equation of the evolute of any conic. Apollonius in the Conics further developed a method that is so similar to analytic geometry that his work is sometimes thought to have anticipated the work of Descartes by some 1800 years. His application of reference lines, a diameter and a tangent is essentially no different than our modern use of a coordinate frame, where the distances measured along the diameter from the point of tangency are the abscissas, and the segments parallel to the tangent and intercepted between the axis and the curve are the ordinates. He further developed relations between the abscissas and the corresponding ordinates that are equivalent to rhetorical equations of curves. However, although Apollonius came close to developing analytic geometry, he did not manage to do so since he did not take into account negative magnitudes and in every case the coordinate system was superimposed upon a given curve a posteriori instead of a priori. That is, equations were determined by curves, but curves were not determined by equations. Coordinates, variables, and equations were subsidiary notions applied to a specific geometric situation. Pappus mentions other treatises of Apollonius:

6 1. ("Cutting of a Ratio") 2. ("Cutting of an Area") 3. ("Determinate Section") 4. ("Tangencies") 5. ("Inclinations") 6. ("Plane Loci"). Each of these was divided into two books, andwith the Data, the Porisms, and Surface-Loci of Euclid and the Conics of Apolloniuswere, according to Pappus, included in the body of the ancient analysis

Ren Descartes French pronunciation: [ne dekat]; (31 March 1596 11 February 1650) (Latinized
form: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian")[3] was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes, in a 2D coordinate system was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution. Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters before". Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like St. Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differs from the schools on two major points: First, he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to endsdivine or naturalin explaining natural phenomena.[4] In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of Gods act of creation. Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, JeanJacques Rousseau, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well. He is perhaps best known for the philosophical statement "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; English: I think, therefore I am), found in part IV of Discourse on the Method (1637 written in French but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and 7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644 written in Latin) Mathematical legacy One of Descartes most enduring legacies was his development of Cartesian or analytic geometry, which uses algebra to describe geometry. He "invented the convention of representing unknowns in equations by x, y, and z, and knowns by a, b, and c". He also "pioneered the standard notation" that uses superscripts to show the powers or exponents, for example the 4 used in x4 to indicate squaring of squaring.[19]. Descartes work provided the basis for the calculus developed by Newton and Leibniz, who applied infinitesimal calculus to the tangent line problem, thus permitting the evolution of that branch of modern mathematics.[20]

7 Descartes' rule of signs is also a commonly used method to determine the number of positive and negative roots of a polynomial. Descartes discovered an early form of the law of conservation of momentum (the term momentum refers to the momentum of a force). He outlined his views on the universe in his Principles of Philosophy. Descartes also made contributions to the field of optics. He showed by using geometric construction and the law of refraction (also known as Descartes's law or more commonly Snell's law, who discovered it 16 years earlier) that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42 degrees (i.e., the angle subtended at the eye by the edge of the rainbow and the ray passing from the sun through the rainbow's centre is 42). [21] He also independently discovered the law of reflection, and his essay on optics was the first published mention of this law.

Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (Russian: ) (25 April 1903

20 October 1987) [2][3] was a Soviet mathematician, preeminent in the 20th century, who advanced various scientific fields, among them probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics and computational complexity. Early life - Kolmogorov was born at Tambov in 1903. His unwed mother died in childbirth and he was raised by his aunts in Tunoshna near Yaroslavl at the estate of his grandfather, a wealthy nobleman. His father, an agronomist by trade, was deported from Saint-Petersburg for participation in the revolutionary movement. He disappeared and was presumed to have been killed in the Russian Civil War. Kolmogorov was educated in his aunt's village school, and his earliest literary efforts and mathematical papers were printed in the school newspaper. As an adolescent he designed perpetual motion machines, concealing their (necessary) defects so cleverly that his secondary-school teachers could not discover them. In 1910, his aunt adopted him and then they moved to Moscow, where he went to a gymnasium, graduating from it in 1920. In 1920, Kolmogorov began to study at the Moscow State University and the Chemistry Technological Institute. Kolmogorov gained a reputation for his wide-ranging erudition. As an undergraduate, he participated in the seminars of the Russian historian S.V. Bachrushin, and he published his first research paper on the landholding practices in the Novgorod Republic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.[4] At the same time (19211922), Kolmogorov derived and proved several results in set theory and in the theory of Fourier series (trigonometrical series). [edit] Maturity In 1922 Kolmogorov constructed a Fourier series that diverges almost everywhere, gaining international recognition.[citation needed] Around this time he decided to devote his life to mathematics. In 1925 Kolmogorov graduated from Moscow State University, and began to study under the supervision of Nikolai Luzin. He made lifelong friends and was involved in a homosexual relationship with Pavel Alexandrov. Both were involved in 1936 in political persecution of their common teacher, the so-called Luzin affair. Kolmogorov (together with A. Khinchin) became interested in probability theory. Also in 1925, he published his famous work in intuitionistic logic On the principle of the excluded middle, where he proved that under a certain interpretation all statements of classical formal logic can be formulated as those of intuitionistic logic. In 1929 Kolmogorov earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree, Ph.D., at the Moscow State University. In 1930, Kolmogorov went on his first long trip abroad, traveling to Gttingen and Munich, Germany, and then to Paris, France. His pioneering work About the Analytical Methods of Probability Theory was published (in German)

8 in 1931. Also in 1931, he became a professor at Moscow University. In 1933, Kolmogorov published the book, Foundations of the Theory of Probability, laying the modern axiomatic foundations of probability theory and establishing his reputation as the world's leading living expert in this field. In 1935, Kolmogorov became the first chairman of probability theory at the Moscow State University. In 1939, he was elected a full member (academician) of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In a 1938 paper, Kolmogorov "established the basic theorems for smoothing and predicting stationary stochastic processes" a paper that would have major military applications during the Cold War to come.[5] Around the same years (1936) Kolmogorov contributed to the field of ecology and generalized the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey systems. In his study of stochastic processes (random processes), especially Markov processes, Kolmogorov and the British mathematician Sydney Chapman independently developed the pivotal set of equations in the field, the Chapman Kolmogorov equations Later on, Kolmogorov changed his research interests to the area of turbulence, where his publications beginning in 1941 had a significant influence on the field. In classical mechanics, he is best known for the Kolmogorov ArnoldMoser theorem (first presented in 1954 at the International Congress of Mathematicians). In 1957 he solved a particular interpretation of Hilbert's thirteenth problem (a joint work with his student V. I. Arnold). He was a founder of algorithmic complexity theory, often referred to as Kolmogorov complexity theory, which he began to develop around this time. Kolmogorov married Anna Dmitrievna Egorova in 1942. He pursued a vigorous teaching routine throughout his life, not only at the university level but also with younger children, as he was actively involved in developing a pedagogy for gifted children, in literature, and in music, as well as in mathematics. At the Moscow State University, Kolmogorov occupied different positions, including the heads of several departments: probability, statistics, and random processes; mathematical logic; and he also served as the Dean of the Moscow State University Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. In 1971, Kolmogorov joined an oceanographic expedition aboard the research vessel Dmitri Mendeleev. He wrote a number of articles for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In his later years he devoted much of his effort to the mathematical and philosophical relationship between probability theory in abstract and applied areas.[6] Kolmogorov died in Moscow in 1987. A quotation, "Every mathematician believes he is ahead over all others. The reason why they don't say this in public, is because they are intelligent people" is attributed to him.