5 famous mathematicians
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American Scientist
Given that the book is written in the first-person singular, it would be interesting to know what role his coauthor, Steve Nadis, an accomplished science writer, played in helping depict Yau’s personal and professional history. Did Nadis sit down with a tape recorder and interview Yau? Did the two actively craft the story together? The book offers few details. When Yau is describing his five-year, long-distance courtship of the physics graduate student who later became his wife, he confesses that people in his line of work are usually more fluent in numbers than in words. This admission piqued my curiosity. I would like to know more about how this engaging, eminently readable tale was assembled.
The Shape of a Life does a splendid job of exploring the man, his mathematics, and the cultural milieu and intellectual and political setting in which he developed. The early chapters cover Yau’s impoverished childhood in mainland China and later in Hong Kong, where his family fled in 1949, six months after his birth, amid the turmoil of China’s civil war and the s
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A Mathematician's Apology
1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy
A Mathematician's Apology is a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy which defends the pursuit of mathematics for its own sake. Central to Hardy's "apology" – in the sense of a formal justification or defence (as in Plato's Apology of Socrates) – is an argument that mathematics has value independent of its applications. Hardy located this value in what he called the beauty of mathematics and gave some examples of and criteria for mathematical beauty. The book also includes a brief autobiography which gives insight into the mind of a working mathematician.
Background
Hardy wished to justify his life's work in mathematics for two reasons. Firstly, having survived a heart attack and being at the age of 62, Hardy knew that he was approaching old age and that his mathematical creativity and skills were declining. By devoting time to writing the Apology, Hardy was admitting that his own time as a creative mathematician was finished. In his foreword to the 1967 edition of the book,
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Mathematician
Person with an extensive knowledge of mathematics
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
For broader coverage of this topic, see History of mathematics.
One of the earliest known mathematicians was Thales of Miletus (c. 624 – c. 546 BC); he has been hailed as the first true mathematician and the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed.[1] He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four corollaries to Thales's theorem.
The number of known mathematicians grew when Pythagoras of Samos (c. 582 – c. 507 BC) established the Pythagorean school, whose doctrine it was that mathematics ruled the universe and whose motto was "All is number".[2] It was the Pythagoreans who coined the term "mathematics", and with whom the study of mathema
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