Life and career
Apostol was born in Helper, Utah. His parents, Emmanouil Apostolopoulos and Efrosini Papathanasopoulos, were Greek immigrants. [2] Apostolopoulos's name was shortened to Mike Apostol when he obtained his United States citizenship, and Tom Apostol inherited this Americanized surname. [2]
Apostol received his Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering in 1944, Master's degree in mathematics from the University of Washington in 1946, and a PhD in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1948. [3] Thereafter Apostol was a faculty member at UC Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech. He was the author of several influential graduate and undergraduate level textbooks.
Apostol was the creator and project director for Project MATHEMATICS! producing videos which explore basic topics in high school mathematics. He helped popularize the visual calculus devised by Mamikon Mnatsakanian with whom he also wrote a number of papers, many of which appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly . Apostol also provided academic content for an acclaimed video lecture series on introductory physics, The Mechanical Universe .
In 2001, Apostol was elected in the Academy of Athens. [4] [5] He received a Lester R. Ford Award in 2005, [6] [7] [8] in 2008, [9] and in 2010. [10] In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [11]
Calculus is the mathematical study of continuous change, in the same way that geometry is the study of shape, and algebra is the study of generalizations of arithmetic operations.
Paul Richard Halmos was a Hungarian-born American mathematician and statistician who made fundamental advances in the areas of mathematical logic, probability theory, statistics, 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.
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In plane geometry, Holditch's theorem states that if a chord of fixed length is allowed to rotate inside a convex closed curve, then the locus of a point on the chord a distance p from one end and a distance q from the other is a closed curve whose enclosed area is less than that of the original curve by . The theorem was published in 1858 by Rev. Hamnet Holditch. While not mentioned by Holditch, the proof of the theorem requires an assumption that the chord be short enough that the traced locus is a simple closed curve.
Visual calculus, invented by Mamikon Mnatsakanian, is an approach to solving a variety of integral calculus problems. Many problems that would otherwise seem quite difficult yield to the method with hardly a line of calculation, often reminiscent of what Martin Gardner called "aha! solutions" or Roger Nelsen a proof without words.
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The ICTCM Award is presented each year at the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics sponsored by Pearson Addison–Wesley & Pearson Prentice Hall publishers. This award, now in its twelfth year, was established by Pearson Education to recognize an individual or group for excellence and innovation in using technology to enhance the teaching and learning of mathematics. Electronic conference proceedings are available beginning with ICTCM 7. List of free electronic journals in mathematics
Mamikon A. Mnatsakanian (1942-2021) was an Armenian physicist. In 1959, he discovered a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
In Euclidean geometry, a tangential polygon, also known as a circumscribed polygon, is a convex polygon that contains an inscribed circle. This is a circle that is tangent to each of the polygon's sides. The dual polygon of a tangential polygon is a cyclic polygon, which has a circumscribed circle passing through each of its vertices.
Howard Levi was an American mathematician who worked mainly in algebra and mathematical education. Levi was very active during the educational reforms in the United States, having proposed several new courses to replace the traditional ones.
In geometry, a cyclogon is the curve traced by a vertex of a polygon that rolls without slipping along a straight line. There are no restrictions on the nature of the polygon. It can be a regular polygon like an equilateral triangle or a square. The polygon need not even be convex: it could even be a star-shaped polygon. More generally, the curves traced by points other than vertices have also been considered. In such cases it would be assumed that the tracing point is rigidly attached to the polygon. If the tracing point is located outside the polygon, then the curve is called a prolate cyclogon, and if it lies inside the polygon it is called a curtate cyclogon.
In mathematics and particularly in elementary geometry, a circumgon is a geometric figure which circumscribes some circle, in the sense that it is the union of the outer edges of non-overlapping triangles each of which has a vertex at the center of the circle and opposite side on a line that is tangent to the circle. The limiting case in which part or all of the circumgon is a circular arc is permitted. A circumgonal region is the union of those triangular regions.
James Henry Weaver was an American mathematician.
Judith Lee MacKenzie Gersting is an American mathematician, computer scientist, and textbook author. She is a professor emerita of computer science at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.
Barbara Burke Hubbard is an American science journalist, mathematics popularizer, textbook author, and book publisher, known for her books on wavelet transforms and multivariable calculus.
