Letters to a Young Mathematician

Last updated

Letters to a Young Mathematician
Letters to a Young Mathematician.png
Author Ian Stewart (mathematician)
LanguageEnglish
Series Art of Mentoring
Genre Epistolary novel
Publisher Basic Books
Publication date
2006
Publication placeUnited States
Pages210 (first edition, paperback)
ISBN 0-465-08231-9 (first edition, paperback)
OCLC 963569756



Letters to a Young Mathematician ( ISBN   0-465-08231-9) is a 2006 book by Ian Stewart, and is part of Basic Books' Art of Mentoring series. Stewart mentions in the preface that he considers this book an update to G.H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology .

The book is made up of letters to a fictional correspondent of Stewart's, an aspiring mathematician named Meg. The roughly chronological letters follow Meg from her high school years up to her receiving tenure from an American university. [1]

Reviews of the book were generally positive. Fernando Q. Gouvêa's review for the MAA calls it "full of good advice, much of it direct and to the point" and later, that "while it won't change the world, it may well help some young people decide to be (or not to be) mathematicians." [2] In Emma Carberry's review for the AMS, reacted differently, saying that "one does not so much feel the benefit of a ream of practical advice, but rather of exposure to the inner realm of mathematics". [3] A review in Nature was harsher, however, saying that "there is a general lack of information ... [and] too much jargon" and that it "suffers from being written entirely for a US audience", but even this review finds a bright note, "The letter in which Stewart tells Meg how to teach undergraduates should be compulsory reading for all lecturers and tutors." [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Gardner</span> American mathematics and science writer (1914–2010)

Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mathematical Association of America</span> American organization that focuses on undergraduate-level mathematics

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians; computer scientists; statisticians; and many others in academia, government, business, and industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Mathematical Society</span> Association of professional mathematicians

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, advocacy and other programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Halmos</span> Hungarian-American mathematician (1916–2006)

Paul Richard Halmos was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and probabilist who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis. He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. He has been described as one of The Martians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daina Taimiņa</span> Latvian mathematician

Daina Taimiņa is a Latvian mathematician, retired adjunct associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University, known for developing a way of modeling hyperbolic geometry with crocheted objects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Herbert Wilf</span> American mathematician

Herbert Saul Wilf was an American mathematician, specializing in combinatorics and graph theory. He was the Thomas A. Scott Professor of Mathematics in Combinatorial Analysis and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania. He wrote numerous books and research papers. Together with Neil Calkin he founded The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics in 1994 and was its editor-in-chief until 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chuu-Lian Terng</span> Taiwanese-American mathematician

Chuu-Lian Terng is a Taiwanese-American mathematician. Her research areas are differential geometry and integrable systems, with particular interests in completely integrable Hamiltonian partial differential equations and their relations to differential geometry, the geometry and topology of submanifolds in symmetric spaces, and the geometry of isometric actions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy Gray</span> English mathematician

Jeremy John Gray is an English mathematician primarily interested in the history of mathematics.

The Euler Book Prize is an award named after Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) and given annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings by the Mathematical Association of America to an outstanding book in mathematics that is likely to improve the public view of the field.

Sylvia Margaret Wiegand is an American mathematician.

Sylvia D. Trimble Bozeman is an African American mathematician and Mathematics educator.

Joan Prince Hutchinson is an American mathematician and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Macalester College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abigail Thompson</span> American mathematician

Abigail A. Thompson is an American mathematician. She works as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in knot theory and low-dimensional topology.

Susan Renee Loepp is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at Williams College. Her research concerns commutative algebra.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emily Riehl</span> American mathematician

Emily Riehl is an American mathematician who has contributed to higher category theory and homotopy theory. Much of her work, including her PhD thesis, concerns model structures and more recently the foundations of infinity-categories. She is the author of two textbooks and serves on the editorial boards of three journals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alissa Crans</span> American mathematician

Alissa Susan Crans is an American mathematician specializing in higher-dimensional algebra. She is a professor of mathematics at Loyola Marymount University, and the associate director of Project NExT, a program of the Mathematical Association of America to mentor post-doctoral mathematicians, statisticians, and mathematics teachers.

Pamela Estephania Harris is a Mexican-American mathematician, educator and advocate for immigrants. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was formerly an associate professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts and is co-founder of the online platform Lathisms. She is also an editor of the e-mentoring blog of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Farris</span> American mathematician

Frank A. Farris is an American mathematician. He is a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Santa Clara University. He is also an editor, author, and artist whose work concerns mathematical topics. Farris is known primarily for mathematical exposition, his creation of visual mathematics through computer science, and advocacy for mathematical art as a discipline.

The Equidistribution of Lattice Shapes of Rings of Integers of Cubic, Quartic, and Quintic Number Fields: An Artist's Rendering is a mathematics book by Piper Harron, based on her Princeton University doctoral thesis of the same title. It has been described as "feminist", "unique", "honest", "generous", and "refreshing".

Lisa Mantini is an American mathematician.

References

  1. "Clever proof that math has its charms". Christian Science Monitor. 25 April 2006.
  2. "Read This: Letters to a Young Mathematician". www.maa.org. Archived from the original on 16 June 2006.
  3. Carberry, Emma. "Letters to a Young Mathematician" (PDF). www.ams.org. Retrieved 22 October 2024.
  4. Parker, Rhian (2006). "The maths mentor". Nature. 442 (7098): 30. Bibcode:2006Natur.442...30P. doi: 10.1038/442030b .