V olume 3 , N umber 4 A pril 2009

It is with great pleasure that I return as guest editor of The Reasoner; my thanks to Jon Williamson and Federica Russo for the invitation. Dr. Keith Devlin kindly agreed to be this month’s interviewee. Dr. Keith Devlin is a Senior Researcher at CSLI and its Executive Director, a Consulting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, and a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network and of the university’s H-STAR institute. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Keith Devlin was a member of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Lancaster UK when I first met him, although I’m sure he doesn’t remember me—a graduate student in a different department. Although I never took his courses, I knew students who did and his reputation as a communicator was considerable even in those early days, with high praise for his first book: Sets, Functions and Logic. Keith is a prolific author and his most recent book is The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth Century Letter that Made the World Modern, published by Basic Book in late 2008. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award, Keith is also ‘the Math Guy’ on National Public Radio in the United States. He also finds time for public lectures and television appearances! As a communicator of mathematics and reasoning to a wide audience, his work is truly in the spirit of The Reasoner. As you will see from the interview, Keith’s dedication to mathematics started at an early age leading to a career in pure mathematics. As a pure mathematician his philosophy was Platonist but no longer so; he now claims that ‘mathematics is a human, social construct.’ Although Keith sees little value in teaching logic to students of statistics, he underlines the importance of teaching philosophy to students of probability. In most