Contributors
Heather Anderson is an English teacher and team leader at Health Sciences High & Middle College in San Diego. She has her master's degree in curriculum and instruction from San Diego State University. Besides teaching English in high school, she teaches Spanish to health care workers. She can be reached at [email protected].
Chris J. Budd is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Bath, where he does research into problems at the interface of mathematics, engineering, and industry. These problems include studying weather forecasting, microwave cooking, geology, and the optimal design of aircraft structures. He is interested in any application of mathematics to the real world, from the study of crowds to the design of folk dances. He is a passionate popularizer of mathematics and is heavily involved with many programs that make math fun and relevant to people's lives. This includes working as professor of mathematics at the Royal Institution, giving Saturday “mathematics master classes” to young people, and presenting many talks all around the world. He has recently been elected a Fellow of the British Science Association and has co-authored the popular math book Mathematics Galore. When not doing math he can be found in the mountains with his dog.
Martin Campbell-Kelly is professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at Warwick University, where he specializes in the history of computing. He has held visiting appointments at the London School of Economics, Manchester University, the Smithsonian Institution, and MIT. His publications include a history of the software industry From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog and the popular textbook Computer: A History of the Information Machine, co-authored with William Aspray.
Barry A. Cipra is a freelance mathematics writer based in Northfield, Minnesota. He has been a contributing correspondent for Science magazine and a regular writer for SIAM News, the monthly newsletter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is the author of Misteaks…and How to Find Them Before the Teacher Does:A Calculus Supplement, published by A.K. Peters, Ltd.
Peter J. Denning is a Distinguished Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He chairs the Computer Science Department and directs the Cebrowski Institute, an interdisciplinary research center for information innovation. In his early career he was a pioneer in virtual memory and in the development of principles for operating systems. He co-founded CSNET, the computer science network of the National Science Foundation, and shared in the 2009 Internet Society Postel Award for this achievement; CSNET was the first community network bridge from the original ARPANET to the modern Internet. He was president of the Association for Computing Machinery from 1980 to 1982. He led the ACM Digital Library project that made ACM the first professional society to place all of its publications online. He has been a prolific author, publishing more than 345 articles in computer science and 10 books. His books include The Invisible Future (McGraw, 2001) and Beyond Calculation (Copernicus, 1997). His most recent book is The Innovator's Way (with Bob Dunham, MIT Press, 2010), about the essential practices of successful innovation. He holds twenty-six awards, including three honorary degrees, three professional society fellowships, six technical achievements, two best papers, three distinguished service awards, a hall of fame award, and several outstanding educator awards.
Underwood Dudley received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1965. He taught at the Ohio State University and at DePauw University, retiring in 2004. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Mathematical Cranks and Numerology. He has edited the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal and the College Mathematics Journal and is a recipient of the Trevor Evans Award for expository writing.
Freeman Dyson is a retired professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He began his career as a pure mathematician in England but switched to physics after moving to the United States. A volume of his selected papers in mathematics and physics was published by the American Mathematical Society in 1996.
Rob Eastaway is a U.K.-based author and speaker dedicated to the popularization of mathematics. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1985 with a degree in engineering science, specializing in operational research. His books include the best-selling Why Do Buses Come in Threes? and Old Dogs, New Math. He is the director of Mathematics Inspiration, a program of theatre- based lectures for teenagers in the United Kingdom, and was president of the U.K. Mathematical Association in 2007-2008. For several years he designed puzzles for New Scientist magazine.
Jordan Ellenberg is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, specializing in number theory and arithmetic geometry. He is the author of The Grasshopper King, a novel.
Claire Ferguson has written extensively on Helaman Ferguson's work, including the Gold Ink and Ozzie award-winning book Helaman Ferguson: Mathematics in Stone and Bronze. She is a graduate of Smith College and an accomplished watercolor artist.
Helaman Ferguson loves math and creates art. Fortunately for him, his wife of nearly a half-century, Claire, and their seven offspring are similarly and sympathetically endowed. Helaman's current sculpture studio is in Baltimore, Maryland. Therein he has built a living room-sized, five-axes-gantry programmable industrial robot so he can quantitatively carve negative stone molds for casting positive silicon bronze.
Douglas Fisher is a professor in the college of education at San Diego State University and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High & Middle College. He is the co-author of Better Learning Through Structured Teaching and can be reached at [email protected].
Marianne Freiberger is co-editor of Plus online magazine (http://plus.maths.org), a free online magazine about mathematics aimed at the general public. Plus is part of the Millennium Mathematics Project, based at the University of Cambridge. Before joining Plus, Marianne did research in holomorphic dynamics.
Nancy Frey is a professor in the college of education at San Diego State University and a teacher leader at Health Sciences High & Middle College. She is the co-author of Guided Instruction: How to Develop Confident and Successful Learners and can be reached at [email protected].
Ian Hacking has retired from his chair at the College de France, Paris, and from a university professorship at the University of Toronto. He has written many books on many topics, of which his favorite is still The Emergence of Probability (1975, 2006). A companion work is The Taming of Chance (1990). He has published little on the philosophy of mathematics, but it was his first love. In 2010 he gave the Descartes lectures in Holland and the Howison lectures in Berkeley on this topic. A much extended version of these talks is in press from Cambridge University Press: The Mathematical Animal: Philosophical Reflections on Proof, Necessity and Human Nature. In 2009 he was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize given in Norway for “outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology.”
James Hamlin is a software engineer in the DirectX Driver Group at NVIDIA. James received his M.S. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he published work on computer-aided design and visualization. He also holds a B.A. in computer science and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley.
David J. Hand is Professor of Statistics at Imperial College, London, and Chief Scientific Advisor of Winton Capital Management, one of the world's leading CTA hedge funds. He served two terms as president of the Royal Statistical Society. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and has been awarded the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society.
Ivan M. Havel is a cognitive scientist and cofounder and past director of the Center for Theoretical Study, an international cross-disciplinary research institution affiliated with Charles University in Prague and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He graduated in 1966 from Technical University in Prague and in 1971 earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on human mind, consciousness, and related areas of philosophy and cognitive science, with a special interest in episodic experience. He teaches on artificial and natural thinking at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. He is editor in chief of the scientific journal Vesmir, a member of Academia Europaea, and serves on boards of several academic institutions and educational foundations.
Reuben Hersh is professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico. He is the co-author, with Vera John-Steiner, of Loving and Hating Mathematics. He is also the author of What Is Mathematics, Really? and, with Philip J. Davis, the co-author of The Mathematical Experience, which won a National Book Award in 1983.
Hans Niels Jahnke is Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He is author of Mathematik und Bildung in der Humboldtschen Reform (1990), editor of A History of Analysis (AMS 2003), and co-editor of books on proof and on the history of science in the early nineteenth century. His research fields in education are proof and the inclusion of history of mathematics into mathematics teaching.
Ioan James is best known in the mathematical world for his contributions to homotopy theory. His academic career was mainly at Oxford University, where he held the Savilian Chair of Geometry. When he retired from this, he decided to reinvent himself as a writer. He had already written a number of books and many articles on mathematical subjects, but recently he has written about people with Asperger's syndrome, the psychology of mathematicians, and the lives of scientists. His latest book, Driven to Innovate, is about outstanding Jewish mathematicians and physicists of the nineteenth century. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an Honorary Fellow of two Oxford colleges. He was president of the London Mathematical Society. He was founding editor of the journal Topology.
Erica Klarreich is a mathematics and science writer based in Berkeley, California. She has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stony Brook University and a certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her articles have appeared in Nature, New Scientist, American Scientist, Science News, and other publications.
When he was a child, Dana Mackenzie wanted to be a writer. However, he took a circuitous path. He majored in mathematics at Swarthmore College and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1983. After teaching at Duke University for six years and Kenyon College for seven, he decided to make his childhood dream come true. He completed the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1997, and since then he has made his living as a freelance writer. Mackenzie has written for such magazines as Discover, Smithsonian, Science, and New Scientist. In addition, he has both written and edited articles for American Scientist, where “A Tisket, a Tasket, an Apollonian Gasket” first appeared. His first book, The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be, was published by John Wiley & Sons and was named an Editor's Choice for the year 2003 by Booklist magazine. He has also co-authored a geology textbook for Wiley and he writes the ongoing series “What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences” for the American Mathematical Society. A forthcoming book on the history of mathematics is scheduled for publication by Princeton University Press in 2012.
John Mason is emeritus professor at Open University in the United Kingdom. Previously he has held appointments at a number of other institutions, including at the University of British Columbia, University of Capetown, University of Alberta, University of Southern Queensland, Australian Catholic University, and Dalhousie University. Among his many books and other publications are Thinking Mathematically, Questions and Prompts for Mathematical Thinking (with Anne Watson), Mathematics Teaching Practice, Fundamental Constructs in Mathematics Education (with Sue Johnston-Wilder), and Designing and Using Mathematical Tasks (also with Sue Johnston-Wilder).
Melvyn B. Nathanson is professor of mathematics at the City University of NewYork (Lehman College and the Graduate Center), and the author of more than 150 research papers and books in mathematics. He has held visiting appointments at many universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Tel Aviv, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Doris Schattschneider is professor emerita of mathematics at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has studied the symmetry work of M. C. Escher for more than 35 years; her book M.C. Escher Visions of Symmetry is the definitive publication on that topic. A past editor of Mathematics Magazine, she received from the Mathematical Association of America an Allendorfer Award for writing and a Haimo Award for distinguished college or university teaching. Her research interest is in discrete geometry (tiling problems) and visualization of geometric ideas; she assisted in developing the software The Geometer's Sketchpad.
Alan H. Schoenfeld is the Elizabeth and Edward Conner Professor of Education and Affiliated Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Educational Research Association and a Laureate of the education honor society Kappa Delta Pi. Alan has served as president of the American Educational Research Association and vice president of the National Academy of Education. In 2008 he was given the Senior Scholar Award by AERA's Special Interest Group for Research in Mathematics Education. After obtaining his Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford in 1973, Schoenfeld turned his attention to issues of mathematical thinking, teaching, and learning. His work has focused on problem solving, assessment, teachers' decision- making, and issues of equity and diversity, with the goal of making meaningful mathematics truly accessible to all students. Alan has written, edited, or co- edited twenty-two books and almost 200 articles on thinking and learning. He has an ongoing interest in the development of productive mechanisms for systemic change and for deepening the connections between educational research and practice. His most recent book, HowWe Think, provides detailed models of human decision-making in complex situations, such as teaching.
Andrew Schultz is an assistant professor of mathematics at Wellesley College. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2007, Andrew was a J.L. Doob research assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. He has authored numerous papers on module structures in Galois cohomology and for the mathematical community at large, and he has received teaching awards at both Stanford and Illinois.
Carlo H. Sequin is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. degree in experimental physics from the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 1969. From 1970 until 1976 he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories on the design and investigation of charge-coupled devices for imaging and signal processing applications. At Bell Labs he was also introduced to the world of computer graphics in classes given by Ken Knowlton. In 1977 he joined the faculty in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at Berkeley. He started out by teaching courses on the subject of very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits, thereby building a bridge between the computer sciences division and the electrical engineering faculty. He concentrates on computer graphics, geometric modeling, and the development of computer-aided design (CAD) tools for circuit designers, architects, and mechanical engineers. Since the mid-1990s, Sequin's work in computer graphics and in geometric design have provided a bridge to the world of art. In collaboration with a few sculptors of abstract geometric art, in particular with Brent Collins of Gower, Missouri, Sequin has found yet another domain where new frontiers can be opened through the use of computer-aided tools. Dr. Sequin is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been elected to the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. He has received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award for contributions to the development of computer-aided design tools, the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, and an Outstanding Service Award from the University of California for Exceptional Leadership in the Conception, Design, and Realization of Soda Hall.
Francis Edward Su is a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research mixes geometry, topology, combinatorics, and applications to the social sciences. He has a passion for teaching and popularizing mathematics. From the Mathematical Association of America, he received the 2001 Merten M. Hasse Prize for expository writing and the 2004 Henry L. Alder Award for distinguished teaching. He authors the “Math Fun Facts” website, which receives more than a million hits each year, as well as the popular iPhone app by the same name.
Rik van Grol is a metagrobolist from the Netherlands; he studies, designs, makes, solves, and collects mechanical puzzles. Rik is chief editor of CFF (Cubism For Fun). CFF is the English newsletter from the Dutch Cube Club (http://cff.helm.lu), the longest surviving puzzle club. Rik has a Ph.D. in physics and works in the field of transport modeling. More information is available at http://www.significance.nl/rik_van_grol.html.
Feng Ye holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from Princeton University and is currently a professor of philosophy at Peking University, China. He is the author of Strict Finitism and the Logic of Mathematical Applications (Synthese Library, Vol. 355, Springer, 2011), Philosophy of Mathematics in the 20th Century: A Naturalistic Commentary (in Chinese, Peking University Press, 2010), and a number of articles on the philosophy of mathematics, constructive mathematics, and the philosophy of mind and language.