Michèle Audin, Mathematician and Writer

Jonathan Borwein: Experimental Mathematician

Jonathan M. Borwein unexpectedly died on 2 August 2016, in London, Ontario, Canada, where he had been visiting on leave from home institution, the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since his death, the present author and Nelson H. F. Beebe of the University of Utah have been collecting Borwein’s many published papers, books, reports and talks, as well as a number of articles written by others...

A Mathematician Reads

New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published in the postmodern humanities journal Social Text a parody entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” [1]. His point in doing so was to test whether the field of “cultural studies of science” was seriously lacking in “intellectual standards”. His article is nonsense from start to...

To an unknown mathematician!

It is said in the New Testament that the apostle Paul, when addressing the Athenians, complimented them for having inscribed “To an unknown god” onto one of their altars. Reading the Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 (Yale Babylonian Collection), one might well be tempted to erect another altar to this unknown mathematician who, nearly four thousand years ago, engraved into clay what is for us one of ...

David Rittenhouse: Modern Mathematician

O n the surface it seems implausible that a colonial scientist could be characterized as a mathematician by today’s standards. Yet the single aim of this note is to provide evidence that two of David Rittenhouse’s papers from 220 years ago qualify him as a modern analyst. Rittenhouse (1732–1796) had no formal education and never earned a degree. Except for a brief appointment as professor of as...

The mathematician as a formalist