Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Mathematicians

If John F. Kennedy had been a mathematician instead of a politician, his Pultizer-prize winning book Profiles In Courage might well have been titled "Profiles In Numbers."

Luckily, Steven Krantz, a professor of mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis, has picked up where Kennedy left off with Mathematical Apocrypha Redux, a sequel to his Mathematical Apocrypha. Published by the Mathematical Association of America, the book is a collection of anecdotes about famous mathematicians.

Putting a human face on mathematicians is Krantz's goal with the book. Not that mathematicians are any different from the rest of us, of course. If I recall it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said in his short story "The Rich Boy" that (and correct me if I'm wrong here) "Let me tell you about mathematicians. They are different from you and me." (Or was he talking about rich people, or maybe rich mathematicins? Whatever.) In any event, Krantz pulls together a bunch of humorous anecodotes about people you may or may not have heard about before. For instance:

• One day, a very famous mathematician at Princeton University named Willie Feller and his wife were trying to move a large table from their living room into their dining room. But they couldn't get it through the door. They struggled and they struggled and they just couldn't do it, and finally, in exhaustion and frustration, Feller sat down and did a mathematical derivation to prove that the table couldn't be gotten through the door. Meanwhile, as he was doing that, his wife got the table through the door.

• My friend Ken Rosen is most successful textbook authors around -- he has a very successful book on discrete math. And this book is actually used in Kuwait. In fact, the Kuwaitis had some trouble with this book's section on logic. And one of the things you do in sentential logic is you teach the students to analyze the truth value of the various sentences. There are some famous examples that you always use. So, one of the examples in this book is: if one plus one equals three, then God does not exist. Another example is: if two plus two equals four, then pigs can fly. He has these in his book. And the Kuwaitis were very unhappy with him because they thought the first sentence was blasphemous, and the second sentence somehow associated the unclean pig with God. They had to undergo some negotiation.

• John Nash gave a talk in 2002, after the movie "A Beautiful Mind" had come out. It was very well attended. I think 2000 people went to the talk, and it was a very technical talk. The next day, my friend from Sweden, Christer Kiselman, went up to John Nash and congratulated him on the talk. He said, "Gee, I was very pleased to see how many people came out to your talk." And Nash said, "Well there's this movie starring Russell Crowe that seems to have gotten a lot of attention."

Of course, Krantz better watch out because he could end up being the subject of someone else's book. After all, he's a mathematician who has published 53 books himself and got his Ph.D. at the advanced age of 23. He received the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematics Association of America (MAA) in 1992 for expository writing, and the Beckenbach Prize of the MAA in 1994 for his book, Complex Analysis: The Geometric Viewpoint.

According to Krantz "Being a mathematician is a bit like being a manic depressive: you spend your life alternating between giddy elation and black despair."

I know the feeling--every month when I add and subtract (mainly subtract) while balancing my checkbook.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:21 AM  Permalink