Stanley Wagon is a Canadian-American mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is the author of multiple books on number theory, geometry, and computational mathematics, and is also known for his snow sculpture.
Wagon was born in Montreal, to Sam and Diana (Idlovitch) Wagon. [1] His sister Lila (Wagon) Hope-Simpson died in 2021. [2] Wagon did his undergraduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1971. He earned his Ph.D. in 1975 from Dartmouth College, under the supervision of James Earl Baumgartner. He married mathematician Joan Hutchinson, and the two of them shared a single faculty position at Smith College and again at Macalester, where they moved in 1990. [3] [4] [5]
Wagon is also known for riding a bicycle with square wheels, [9] [10] for his mathematical snow sculptures, [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] and for having given the name to the 420 Arch, a natural stone arch in southern Utah. [17]
Wagon won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for his 1988 paper, "Fourteen Proofs of a Result about Tiling a Rectangle". [18] Wagon and his co-authors Ellen Gethner and Brian Wick won the Chauvenet Prize for mathematical exposition in 2002 for their 1998 paper, "A Stroll through the Gaussian Primes". [19] [20]
A computer algebra system (CAS) or symbolic algebra system (SAS) is any mathematical software with the ability to manipulate mathematical expressions in a way similar to the traditional manual computations of mathematicians and scientists. The development of the computer algebra systems in the second half of the 20th century is part of the discipline of "computer algebra" or "symbolic computation", which has spurred work in algorithms over mathematical objects such as polynomials.
Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician and mathematician. A prolific author best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic, he also contributed to abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy.
Tarski's circle-squaring problem is the challenge, posed by Alfred Tarski in 1925, to take a disc in the plane, cut it into finitely many pieces, and reassemble the pieces so as to get a square of equal area. This was proven to be possible by Miklós Laczkovich in 1990; the decomposition makes heavy use of the axiom of choice and is therefore non-constructive. Laczkovich estimated the number of pieces in his decomposition at roughly 1050; the pieces used in his decomposition are non-measurable subsets of the plane. A constructive solution was given by Łukasz Grabowski, András Máthé and Oleg Pikhurko in 2016 which worked everywhere except for a set of measure zero. More recently, Andrew Marks and Spencer Unger (2017) gave a completely constructive solution using about Borel pieces. In 2021 Máthé, Noel and Pikhurko improved the properties of the pieces.
Solomon Feferman was an American philosopher and mathematician who worked in mathematical logic. In addition to his prolific technical work in proof theory, computability theory, and set theory, he was known for his contributions to the history of logic and as a vocal proponent of the philosophy of mathematics known as predicativism, notably from an anti-platonist stance.
In mathematics, a non-measurable set is a set which cannot be assigned a meaningful "volume". The mathematical existence of such sets is construed to provide information about the notions of length, area and volume in formal set theory. In Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, the axiom of choice entails that non-measurable subsets of exist.
Thomas Callister Hales is an American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification. In representation theory he is known for his work on the Langlands program and the proof of the fundamental lemma over the group Sp(4). In discrete geometry, he settled the Kepler conjecture on the density of sphere packings and the honeycomb conjecture. In 2014, he announced the completion of the Flyspeck Project, which formally verified the correctness of his proof of the Kepler conjecture.
The Chauvenet Prize is the highest award for mathematical expository writing. It consists of a prize of $1,000 and a certificate, and is awarded yearly by the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of an outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic. The prize is named in honor of William Chauvenet and was established through a gift from J. L. Coolidge in 1925. The Chauvenet Prize was the first award established by the Mathematical Association of America. A gift from MAA president Walter B. Ford in 1928 allowed the award to be given every 3 years instead of the originally planned 5 years.
In mathematics, convex geometry is the branch of geometry studying convex sets, mainly in Euclidean space. Convex sets occur naturally in many areas: computational geometry, convex analysis, discrete geometry, functional analysis, geometry of numbers, integral geometry, linear programming, probability theory, game theory, etc.
Michel Pierre Talagrand is a French mathematician. Doctor of Science since 1977, he has been, since 1985, Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and a member of the Functional Analysis Team of the Institut de Mathématique of Paris. Talagrand was also a faculty member at The Ohio State University for more than fifteen years. Talagrand was elected as correspondent of the Académie des sciences of Paris in March 1997, and then as a full member in November 2004, in the Mathematics section. In 2024, Talagrand received the Abel Prize.
In mathematics, cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) is a notion, along with an algorithm to compute it, that is fundamental for computer algebra and real algebraic geometry. Given a set S of polynomials in Rn, a cylindrical algebraic decomposition is a decomposition of Rn into connected semialgebraic sets called cells, on which each polynomial has constant sign, either +, − or 0. To be cylindrical, this decomposition must satisfy the following condition: If 1 ≤ k < n and π is the projection from Rn onto Rn−k consisting in removing the last k coordinates, then for every pair of cells c and d, one has either π(c) = π(d) or π(c) ∩ π(d) = ∅. This implies that the images by π of the cells define a cylindrical decomposition of Rn−k.
The Banach–Tarski paradox is a theorem in set-theoretic geometry, which states the following: Given a solid ball in three-dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball. Indeed, the reassembly process involves only moving the pieces around and rotating them without changing their shape. However, the pieces themselves are not "solids" in the usual sense, but infinite scatterings of points. The reconstruction can work with as few as five pieces.
David Marius Bressoud is an American mathematician who works in number theory, combinatorics, and special functions. As of 2019 he is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College, Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences and a former President of the Mathematical Association of America.
Randall Dougherty is an American mathematician. Dougherty has made contributions in widely varying areas of mathematics, including set theory, logic, real analysis, discrete mathematics, computational geometry, information theory, and coding theory.
Robert Ralph Phelps was an American mathematician who was known for his contributions to analysis, particularly to functional analysis and measure theory. He was a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington from 1962 until his death.
Basil Gordon was a mathematician at UCLA, specializing in number theory and combinatorics. He obtained his Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Tom Apostol. Ken Ono was one of his students.
In number theory, the Gaussian moat problem asks whether it is possible to find an infinite sequence of distinct Gaussian prime numbers such that the difference between consecutive numbers in the sequence is bounded. More colorfully, if one imagines the Gaussian primes to be stepping stones in a sea of complex numbers, the question is whether one can walk from the origin to infinity with steps of bounded size, without getting wet. The problem was first posed in 1962 by Basil Gordon and it remains unsolved.
Alan Stuart Edelman is an American mathematician and computer scientist. He is a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) where he leads a group in applied computing. In 2004, he founded a business called Interactive Supercomputing which was later acquired by Microsoft. Edelman is a fellow of American Mathematical Society (AMS), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), for his contributions in numerical linear algebra, computational science, parallel computing, and random matrix theory. He is one of the creators of the technical programming language Julia.
Thomas W. Hawkins Jr. is an American historian of mathematics.
Ellen Gethner is a US mathematician and computer scientist specializing in graph theory who won the Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize in 2002 with co-authors Stan Wagon and Brian Wick for their paper A stroll through the Gaussian Primes.
The Banach–Tarski Paradox is a book in mathematics on the Banach–Tarski paradox, the fact that a unit ball can be partitioned into a finite number of subsets and reassembled to form two unit balls. It was written by Stan Wagon and published in 1985 by the Cambridge University Press as volume 24 of their Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications book series. A second printing in 1986 added two pages as an addendum, and a 1993 paperback printing added a new preface. In 2016 the Cambridge University Press published a second edition, adding Grzegorz Tomkowicz as a co-author, as volume 163 of the same series. The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has recommended its inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.
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