Editorial: If Mathematicians Unite…

Measuring with Jugs or What If Mathematicians Were Asked to Defuse Bombs

Script COMPUTER: I am a bomb, you have just armed me. SIMON GRUBER (over a cellular phone): I got you see the message. It has a proximity circuit, so please don't try to run. JOHN MCCLANE: Yeah I got it. We're not gonna run. How do we turn this thing off? SIMON: On the fountain, there should be two jugs. You see them, a ve gallon jug and a three gallon jug? Fill one of the jugs with exactly fou...

Multifaceted Mathematicians

Murderers , Mathematicians ∗

This article outlines the history of our visualization of the interior of the human body. It throws some light on the emotional context and the underlying idea of man. In order of appearance on the historical stage, the leading characters are: painters, murderers (more precisely: executed persons including thieves driven merely by need, women with illegitimate children, etc.), and mathematician...

Mathematicians as Educators

18 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 44, NUMBER 1 The mathematical sciences professions are in a phase transition from which they may well emerge smaller and/or redistributed and much more dispersed. We are not an endangered species, but our health depends on being able to transcend our historic tendencies toward insularity, on our outreach to all of our sister and client communities. This message, in ...

Mathematicians and the Market

Introduction Young mathematicians have been facing dismal job prospects throughout the nineties. The fall unemployment rate for new Ph.D.s in the U.S., as measured by the AMS-IMS-MAA Annual Survey (Second Report), rose from 2.5% in 1990 to a peak of 13.2% in 1994.1 Unemployment rates have fallen moderately since to the current level of 9.5% in 1996. This is not the first time that labor market ...