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Underwood Dudley (born January 6, 1937) is an American mathematician and writer. His popular works include several books describing crank mathematics by pseudomathematicians who incorrectly believe they have squared the circle or done other impossible things.
Dudley was born in New York City. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and a PhD from the University of Michigan. His academic career consisted of two years at Ohio State University followed by 37 at DePauw University, from which he retired in 2004. He edited the College Mathematics Journal and the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, and was a Pólya Lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) for two years. He is the discoverer of the Dudley triangle.
Dudley's popular books include Mathematical Cranks (MAA 1992, ISBN 0-88385-507-0), The Trisectors (MAA 1996, ISBN 0-88385-514-3), and Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought (MAA 1997, ISBN 0-88385-524-0). Dudley won the Trevor Evans Award for expository writing from the MAA in 1996.
Dudley has also written and edited straightforward mathematical works such as Readings for Calculus (MAA 1993, ISBN 0-88385-087-7) and Elementary Number Theory (W.H. Freeman 1978, ISBN 0-7167-0076-X). In 2009, he authored "A Guide to Elementary Number Theory" (MAA, 2009, ISBN 978-0-88385-347-4), published under Mathematical Association of America's Dolciani Mathematical Expositions.
In 1995, Dudley was one of several people sued by William Dilworth for defamation because Mathematical Cranks included an analysis of Dilworth's "A correction in set theory", [1] an attempted refutation of Cantor's diagonal method. The suit was dismissed in 1996 due to failure to state a claim.
The dismissal was upheld on appeal in a decision written by jurist Richard Posner. From the decision: "A crank is a person inexplicably obsessed by an obviously unsound idea—a person with a bee in his bonnet. To call a person a crank is to say that because of some quirk of temperament he is wasting his time pursuing a line of thought that is plainly without merit or promise ... To call a person a crank is basically just a colorful and insulting way of expressing disagreement with his master idea, and it therefore belongs to the language of controversy rather than to the language of defamation." [2]
Leonhard Euler was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician, and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in many other branches of mathematics such as analytic number theory, complex analysis, and infinitesimal calculus. He introduced much of modern mathematical terminology and notation, including the notion of a mathematical function. He is also known for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy, and music theory.
Guy Waldo Dunnington was a writer, historian and professor of German known for his writings on the famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Dunnington wrote several articles about Gauss and later a biography entitled Gauss: Titan of Science (ISBN 0-88385-547-X). He became interested in Gauss through one of his elementary school teachers, Minna Waldeck Gauss Reeves, who was a great-granddaughter of Gauss.
Eric Temple Bell was a Scottish-born mathematician and science fiction writer who lived in the United States for most of his life. He published non-fiction using his given name and fiction as John Taine.
Pseudomathematics, or mathematical crankery, is a mathematics-like activity that does not adhere to the framework of rigor of formal mathematical practice. Common areas of pseudomathematics are solutions of problems proved to be unsolvable or recognized as extremely hard by experts, as well as attempts to apply mathematics to non-quantifiable areas. A person engaging in pseudomathematics is called a pseudomathematician or a pseudomath. Pseudomathematics has equivalents in other scientific fields, and may overlap with other topics characterized as pseudoscience.
David Harold Blackwell was an American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao–Blackwell theorem. He was the first African American inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, the first African American tenured faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, and the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. In 2012, President Obama posthumously awarded Blackwell the National Medal of Science.
Robin James Wilson is an emeritus professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Open University, having previously been Head of the Pure Mathematics Department and Dean of the Faculty. He was a stipendiary lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford and, as of 2006, Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, where he has also been a visiting professor. On occasion, he teaches at Colorado College in the United States. He is also a long standing fellow of Keble College, Oxford.
The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, although it does imply various incorrect values of the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by a physician who was an amateur mathematician, never became law due to the intervention of Prof. C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.
Constance Bowman Reid was the author of several biographies of mathematicians and popular books about mathematics. She received several awards for mathematical exposition. She was not a mathematician but came from a mathematical family—one of her sisters was Julia Robinson, and her brother-in-law was Raphael M. Robinson.
Murray Seymour Klamkin was an American mathematician, known as prolific proposer and editor of professionally-challenging mathematical problems.
William Wade Dunham is an American writer who was originally trained in topology but became interested in the history of mathematics and specializes in Leonhard Euler. He has received several awards for writing and teaching on this subject.
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.
Mathematical Cranks is a book on pseudomathematics and the cranks who create it, written by Underwood Dudley. It was published by the Mathematical Association of America in their MAA Spectrum book series in 1992 (ISBN 0-88385-507-0).
John Dittmer is an American historian, and Professor Emeritus of DePauw University.
Harold Mortimer Edwards, Jr. was an American mathematician working in number theory, algebra, and the history and philosophy of mathematics.
Steven George Krantz is an American scholar, mathematician, and writer. He has authored more than 350 research papers and published more than 150 books. Additionally, Krantz has edited journals such as the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and The Journal of Geometric Analysis.
Harry Pollard was an American mathematician. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1942 under the supervision of David Widder. He then taught at Cornell University, and was Professor of Mathematics at Purdue University from 1961 until his death in 1985. He is known for his work on celestial mechanics, orthogonal polynomials and the n-body problem as well as for the several textbooks he authored or co-authored. In the theory of Orthogonal polynomials, Pollard solved a conjecture of Antoni Zygmund, establishing mean convergence of the partial sums in norms for the Legendre polynomials and Jacobi polynomials in a series of three papers in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. The first of these papers deals with the fundamental case of Legendre polynomials. The end point cases in Pollard's theorem was established by Sagun Chanillo.
Nathan Altshiller Court was a Polish–American mathematician. He was a geometer and the author of the popular book College Geometry, who spent most of his career at the University of Oklahoma.
Daniel "Dan" Simon Kalman is an American mathematician and winner of nine awards for expository writing in mathematics.
Ezra Abraham "Bud" Brown is an American mathematician active in combinatorics, algebraic number theory, elliptic curves, graph theory, expository mathematics and cryptography. He spent most of his career at Virginia Tech where he is now Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics.
Ellen Johnston Maycock is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. She is the former Johnson Family University Professor and professor emerita of mathematics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Her mathematical research was in functional analysis.
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