Mathematicians in history are a colorful lot. Pythagoras in about 500 B.C. was burned to death in his classroom by students who revolted against his teaching. And you thought it was bad in Houston and NY!

Guiseppe Peano, around 1900, intro duced the axiomatic approach to integers, and he was so delighted and entranced by the lacery of symbolism he invented, that when he tried to teach it to the normals, they revolted on him and forced his resignation. "Felony excessive symbolism!"

All the way back in the third century B.C., Aristarchus knew that we were helio-centric, but this was too radical for the Greeks. Imagine that; vomitoriums and wrestling naked, coated with oil in sand pits wasn't too radical for them, but the truth certainly caught in their throats!

Rene Descartes spent the whole of his life as an itinerant warrior, while still finding time to write all that magnificent material for the rest of humanity. After he decided to settle down to a kinder, gentler existence and quit dodging blades and bludgeons, Queen Christina invited him to her court in Stockholm in 1649 to tutor her in mathematics, and he was dead of a lung infection by 1650. All those intelligent critters with metal weaponry couldn't kill him, but an unthinking bug made quick work of him. Goes to show you, when you think you're squatting in tall cotton, you are most vulnerable. Never stop fighting!

Leonhard Euler lost one of his eyes in a senseless accident in 1735 at the age of 28. Then seventeen years before his death he went completely blind in the other eye. He kept at his work, even in the dark, and we're richer for that piece of courage.

It wouldn't do to miss Galileo Galilei; he started school aiming at medicine, but ended up chief mathematician at the court of Florence about 1690. He was into math, physics and astronomy, invented a microscope, discovered the satellites of Jupiter, designed the first pendulum clock, built and marketed a popular compass and wrote with talent, teaching the Copernican system. The Inquisition awarded him for all these gifts he gave mankind by placing him under house arrest. Some people you just can't please. He had to have his book 'Dialogue of Two New Sciences' smuggled to Holland for publication.