What do Fourier, Gauss, Gödel, Laplace, Newton, Shannon & Turing all have in common, apart from being eminent mathematicians, physicists & cryptographers of our time, they all can be found residing in the AND offices…

…unfortunately not literally.

As one of the initial schemes, under our new environmental & infrastructure initiative, we've just completed naming all the rooms in our building to help both visitors & staff designate which rooms are which rather than the old it's: "the backroom on the 2nd floor above the bakery" routine. So why these people?

From ANDs inception the company has always been heavily involved in research & development. Our ethos is to embrace new technological challenges & find innovative solutions to meet customers' needs. Of course this requires dedicated professional research into new & established concepts & theory, but the key to our business & success is the actual implementation of these ideas. So how does this relate to room signs? Well it acts as a reminder to our staff that the technical solutions they are creating are largely based on the dedicated work & pure innovation of a few distinguished individuals from our time & while today large multinationals companies command the world, they depend on the work of a few key individuals to influence the lives of many.

This renaming has generated a lot of interest & the majority of visitors to our office now want to know the decisions & backgrounds to the choices made, so we've decided to feature each room name in the up & coming months & tell you a little about the person:

Gauss - a focus in on Johann Gauss

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855) was a Germa­n mathematician & scientist. Born in Brunswick, Germany, many considered Gauss a prodigy even as a child. By the time he was 21 (1798) he had produced his magnum opus, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, a work fundamental in consolidating number theory as a discipline & shaping the field to present day.

Prior to the publishing of his great work, Gauss gave a proof in his 1799 dissertation of a fundamental theorem of algebra - namely that every polynomial over the complex numbers must have at least one root. Even though other mathematicians before him had tried to prove this, with his own attempt being rejected on the subject, it was the subsequent three further proofs he produced during his lifetime, undoubtedly fuelled by the rejection of his 1st dissertation that considerably clarified the concept of complex numbers in the field. His last proof in 1849 is generally considered rigorous by today's standards.

A second highly regarded work, utilised in all sciences to this day to minimise the impact of measurement error, was the Theory of Celestial Movement & namely the influential treatment of the method of least squares, derived & introduced by Gauss from his own Gaussian gravitation constant (The Gaussian). Gauss became interested in astronomy, as he feared pure mathematics was not considered an important enough a field to be independently supported at the time. Turning his attentions, he sought a position in astronomy & was appointed Professor in Astronomy & Director of the astronomical observatory in Göttingen, in 1807 - a post he held for the remainder of his life. Leaning of the discovery of Ceres by Piazzi in January 1801 & the subsequent problem Piazzi encountered of being unable to relocate the dwarf planet after he tracking it for a couple of months & then lost it after it temporarily disappeared behind the glare of the sun & did not reappear in the anticipated location, Gauss tackled the issue of relocating it after the mathematical tools of the time were unable to extrapolate a position with such little amount of data. At the age of just 23 & after only spending three intense months of work, Gauss predicated the anticipated position for Ceres in December 1801 - turning out to be accurate within a half-degree when it was rediscovered by Franz Xaver von Zach on 31st December 1801.

In 1831 Gauss's collaboration with physics professor Wilhelm Weber lead to new fruitful discoveries & knowledge, including: Representations for the unit of magnetism in terms of mass, length & time, the discovery of Kirchhoff's circuit laws in electricity & the construction of the electromagnetic telegraph in 1833, connecting the Observatory & the Institute of Physics in Göttingen. Gauss also ordered the construction of a magnetic observatory to be built on the gardens of the observatory, which supported measurements of the Earth's magnetic field in many regions of the world.

Gauss died in Göttingen, Hanover in 1855 aged 77.

Fo­urier - a focus in on Joseph Fourier­

Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 - 1830) was a French mathematician & physicist. Born in Auxerre, France, Fourier was an orphan at the age of eight. Educated by the Benvenistes of the Convent of St. Mark, following a recommendation by the Bishop of Auxerre, Fourier went on to be accepted as a military lecturer in Mathematics for the scientific corps of the army. He took prominent role in promoting the French Revolution in his district & was subsequently awarded & appointed the École Normale Supérieure, in 1795, which then led to the offering of a chair at the foremost French Grande École of Engineering, École polytechnique.

In 1798 Joseph Fourier embarked on a mission with Napoleon & was made governor lower Egypt. Blocked from returning to France by the English fleet, he organised workshops for which the French army relied upon for their munitions of war, in addition he also submitting several mathematical papers to Egyptian institute in Cairo. In 1801, following British victories & the capitulation of the French under General Menou, Fourier returned to France & became prefect of Isère - & it was here that he undertook his famous experiments into the propagation of heat.

In 1822, after moving to England in 1816, Fourier published his Théorie analytique de la chaleur. Basing his reasoning on Newton's law of cooling, this document claims that any function of a variable, whether continuous or discontinuous, can be expanded in a series of sines of multiples of the variable. Although subsequently seen to be incorrect, the breakthrough observation that some discontinuous functions are the sum of infinite series was profound. The question of determining when a function is the sum of its Fourier series has been fundamental for centuries

Fourier died in Paris in 1830 aged 62.

Gödel ­- a focus i­n on Kurt Gödel ­

­Kurt Gödel (1906 - 1978) was a brilliant Austrian-American logician, mathematician & philosopher. Born in Brno, Moravia, Czech Republic (Austria-Hungary as it was then) he became a Czechoslovak citizen at the age of 12 when the Austro-Hungarian empire broke up at the end of WWI. In later years he was to become an Austrian citizen at 23, & German citizen at 32 - when Nazi Germany annexed Austria & finally after the WWII an American citizen at 42.

Kurt attended both primary & secondary schools in Brno excelling in languages. However, in 1920 when his older brother Rudolf left to attend the medical school in the University of Vienna, Kurt's interest in mathematics & history increased. At the age of 18 Kurt then decided to join his brother Rudolf at the University of Vienna. By the time of enrolment he had already mastered university-level mathematics, although initially intending to read theoretical physics. Gödel also attended courses on mathematics & philosophy during this time, adopted the ideas of mathematical realism & number theory, but it was when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick (who he met through the Vienna Circle) which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Kurt really became interested in mathematical logic.

A further significant moment in shaping his life's path was the publication of rundzüge der theoretischen Logik (Principles of Theoretical Logic) in 1928 by Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann in which an introduction to first-order logic & the problem of completeness was posed - Gödel chose this topic for his doctorate work & at the age of 23 (1929) he completed his dissertation establishing the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus (this result is known as Gödel's completeness theorem).

A year after completing his doctorate, at the age of 25, Gödel published his famous incompleteness theorems. The more famous of the theorems states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.

He also showed that the continuum hypothesis cannot be disproved from the accepted axioms of set theory, if those axioms are consistent.

Kurt Gödel established a legendary friendship with Albert Einstein from meeting in 1933, when Gödel travelled to the US to annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Sharing in walks taken together to & from the Institute for Advance Study the nature of their talks were a mystery to other institute members. In later years Gödel even demonstrated the existence of paradoxical solutions to Albert Einstein's field equations in general relativity. These "rotating universes" would allow time travel & even caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely…to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel"

Gödel married Adele Nimbursky in 1938, whom he had know for some 10 years.

Sadly in later life Gödel suffered with periods of mental instability & illness. He developed an obsessive fear of being poisoned & would only eat if Adele (his wife) had first tasted the food for him. Tragically it was this fear that lead to his death in 1978. Late in 1977 Adele was hospitalised for 6 months & could no longer taste Gödel's food. In her absence he refused to eat, eventually starving himself to death. He was 65 pounds when he died, aged 71. ­­­­