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Despite the renown of the Fields Medals, J.C. Fields has been until now a rather obscure figure, and recovering details about his professional activities and personal life was not at all a simple task. This work is a triumph of persistence with far-flung archival and documentary sources, and provides a rich non-mathematical portrait of the man in all aspects of his life and career. Highly readable and replete with period detail, the book sheds useful light on the mathematical and scientific world of Fields' time, and is sure to remain the definitive biographical study. --Tom Archibald, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, Riehm and Hoffman...
Divisors and Sandpiles provides an introduction to the combinatorial theory of chip-firing on finite graphs. Part 1 motivates the study of the discrete Laplacian by introducing the dollar game. The resulting theory of divisors on graphs runs in close parallel to the geometric theory of divisors on Riemann surfaces, and Part 1 culminates in a full exposition of the graph-theoretic Riemann-Roch theorem due to M. Baker and S. Norine. The text leverages the reader's understanding of the discrete story to provide a brief overview of the classical theory of Riemann surfaces. Part 2 focuses on sandpiles, which are toy models of physical systems with dynamics controlled by the discrete Laplacian of ...
An anthology of the year's finest writing on mathematics from around the world, featuring promising new voices as well as some of the foremost names in mathematics.
A Dingo Ate My Math Book presents ingenious, unusual, and beautiful nuggets of mathematics with a distinctly Australian flavor. It focuses, for example, on Australians' love of sports and gambling, and on Melbourne's iconic, mathematically inspired architecture. Written in a playful and humorous style, the book offers mathematical entertainment as well as a glimpse of Australian culture for the mathematically curious of all ages. This collection of engaging stories was extracted from the Maths Masters column that ran from 2007 to 2014 in Australia's Age newspaper. The maths masters in question are Burkard Polster and Marty Ross, two (immigrant) Aussie mathematicians, who each week would write about math in the news, providing a new look at old favorites, mathematical history, quirks of school mathematics—whatever took their fancy. All articles were written for a very general audience, with the intention of being as inviting as possible and assuming a minimum of mathematical background.
This is the first truly comprehensive and thorough history of the development of mathematics and a mathematical community in the United States and Canada. This first volume of the multi-volume work takes the reader from the European encounters with North America in the fifteenth century up to the emergence of a research community the United States in the last quarter of the nineteenth. In the story of the colonial period, particular emphasis is given to several prominent colonial figures—Jefferson, Franklin, and Rittenhouse—and four important early colleges—Harvard, Québec, William & Mary, and Yale. During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, mathematics in North Americ...
This book examines the historically unique conditions under which the International Congress of Mathematicians took place in Oslo in 1936. This Congress was the only one on this level to be held during the period of the Nazi regime in Germany (1933–1945) and after the wave of emigrations from it. Relying heavily on unpublished archival sources, the authors consider the different goals of the various participants in the Congress, most notably those of the Norwegian organizers, and the Nazi-led German delegation. They also investigate the reasons for the absence of the proposed Soviet and Italian delegations. In addition, aiming to shed light onto the mathematical dimension of the Congress, the authors provide overviews of the nineteen plenary presentations, as well as their planning and development. Biographical information about each of the plenary speakers rounds off the picture. The Oslo Congress, the first at which Fields Medals were awarded, is used as a lens through which the reader of this book can view the state of the art of mathematics in the mid-1930s.
"The 1920s witnessed the birth of a serious mathematical research community in America. Prior to this, mathematical research was dominated by scholars based in Europe-but World War I had made the importance of scientific and technological development clear to the American research community, resulting in the establishment of new scientific initiatives and infrastructure. Physics and chemistry were the beneficiaries of this renewed scientific focus, but the mathematical community also benefitted, and over time, began to flourish. Over the course of the next two decades, despite significant obstacles, this constellation of mathematical researchers, programs, and government infrastructure would...
This is the first truly comprehensive and thorough history of the development of a mathematical community in the United States and Canada. This second volume starts at the turn of the twentieth century with a mathematical community that is firmly established and traces its growth over the next forty years, at the end of which the American mathematical community is pre-eminent in the world. In the preface to the first volume of this work Zitarelli reveals his animating philosophy, I find that the human factor lends life and vitality to any subject. History of mathematics, in the Zitarelli conception, is not just a collection of abstract ideas and their development. It is a community of pe...
Les mathématiques sont aujourd’hui l’objet de toutes les attentions, dans l’éducation et la recherche, dans les besoins d’innovation technologique, et dans la compétition économique. Les travaux se sont multipliés pour révéler les pénalités infligées aux sociétés où s’affaiblit le maniement des savoirs et des informations associés aux mathématiques. Dans un monde surexposé aux outils algorithmiques, la numératie devient un enjeu civique majeur. Pourtant, le fossé se creuse, en France, entre la formation des élèves, qui perd en efficacité et en équité et la valeur encore élevée de la recherche mathématique ; alors que d’autres nations réagissent pour éd...