On: The Shocking State of Contemporary "Mathematics"

[pingswept]

I've heard the last person to know all of mathematics to be Pascal (d. 1662), Euler (d. 1783), Poincare (d. 1912), or Hilbert (d. 1943). Most of the internet seems to believe that it was Poincare.

See ref to "the last universalist" in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poincare

The Wikipedia reference comes from a book called Men of Mathematics by Eric Temple Bell, I believe.

[ntownsend → pingswept]

Most of the Internet == Wikipedia?

[irskep → ntownsend]

It's pretty clear that he ran a search or two and provided the Wikipedia link for clarity.