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Gwern's Reviews > Fascinating Mathematical People: Interviews and Memoirs
Fascinating Mathematical People: Interviews and Memoirs
by Donald J. Albers
by Donald J. Albers
Interviews with 16 mathematicians 1990 - 2010, similar to the earlier volume Mathematical People (see my review of it). I don't recognize any of the interviewees: Ahlfors, Apostol, Bacon, Banchoff, Bankoff, Beckenbach, Benjamin, Cartwright, Gallian, Guy, Hunt, McDuff, Saari, Selberg, Taylor, Tondeur.
On the whole, I found this volume far less interesting than the other collection. Most of the subjects are post-WWII, non-European (certainly not part of the fascinatingly aristocratic-but-democratic pre-war European mathematical communities), and their lives come off as colorless beneficiaries of the post-WWII expansion of higher ed, moving fairly easily from undergrad to grad to tenure. The interviewers don't have as much personal connection to the interviewees. The exceptions are not always pleasant to read about; Ahlfors, a Finn who had made his way to the USA before WWII, recounts how he patriotically moved himself and his family back to Finland, contributed zilch to the war effort, and then had to place himself & his family at great risk in getting back out of Europe, the sort of story one expects to end with "and then 15 years later, their remains were discovered in a shallow grave near the main road" (meanwhile, I am thinking "you stupid Finn - you went back? You would have helped infinitely more if you had stayed back in the USA or UK!") Few of them can claim to be nearly as colorful as Conway or Diaconis etc, and there's a really striking absence of computers or statistics or anything you might call application. (I think there is one meaningful mention of computers, in the context of computing many zeros of the Riemann function as a heuristic argument for it being true.) This is particularly astonishing given the time period they were interviewed over. I also think that the earlier interviews did better jobs of explaining their professional topics than these do; how they manage the trick of simultaneously being boring or uninformative about the people and being boring or uninformative about their work too, I am not sure. I think they may simply be much shorter but I haven't done a word-count.
The interviews are not 100% rubbish, though. Guy & Selberg make some interesting remarks. Saari is quite amusing. Joseph Gallian's interview paints a memorable picture of union factory work and the occupational hazards which frightened him into mathematics. Dusa McDuff had both a somewhat unusual life and an interesting grandmother. Other than that
Overall, the selection of interviews gave me an impression that in some respects, these were the leftovers. To be read only if one is already interested in one of the interviewees.
On the whole, I found this volume far less interesting than the other collection. Most of the subjects are post-WWII, non-European (certainly not part of the fascinatingly aristocratic-but-democratic pre-war European mathematical communities), and their lives come off as colorless beneficiaries of the post-WWII expansion of higher ed, moving fairly easily from undergrad to grad to tenure. The interviewers don't have as much personal connection to the interviewees. The exceptions are not always pleasant to read about; Ahlfors, a Finn who had made his way to the USA before WWII, recounts how he patriotically moved himself and his family back to Finland, contributed zilch to the war effort, and then had to place himself & his family at great risk in getting back out of Europe, the sort of story one expects to end with "and then 15 years later, their remains were discovered in a shallow grave near the main road" (meanwhile, I am thinking "you stupid Finn - you went back? You would have helped infinitely more if you had stayed back in the USA or UK!") Few of them can claim to be nearly as colorful as Conway or Diaconis etc, and there's a really striking absence of computers or statistics or anything you might call application. (I think there is one meaningful mention of computers, in the context of computing many zeros of the Riemann function as a heuristic argument for it being true.) This is particularly astonishing given the time period they were interviewed over. I also think that the earlier interviews did better jobs of explaining their professional topics than these do; how they manage the trick of simultaneously being boring or uninformative about the people and being boring or uninformative about their work too, I am not sure. I think they may simply be much shorter but I haven't done a word-count.
The interviews are not 100% rubbish, though. Guy & Selberg make some interesting remarks. Saari is quite amusing. Joseph Gallian's interview paints a memorable picture of union factory work and the occupational hazards which frightened him into mathematics. Dusa McDuff had both a somewhat unusual life and an interesting grandmother. Other than that
Overall, the selection of interviews gave me an impression that in some respects, these were the leftovers. To be read only if one is already interested in one of the interviewees.
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Leah
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Oct 20, 2014 07:01AM
Maybe "teachers" rather than "researchers". Ahlfors wrote _the_ introductory textbook in complex analysis. Apostol wrote the book in calculus. Guy wrote the (series of) books on combinatorial games(he's a good researcher too afaik but it's a field that's taken less seriously by academic mathematicians). I am not sure which Taylor the book is about but if it's Richard Taylor, he did fix wiles proof of fermats last theorem, and consensus seems to be that his contributions were crucial.
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I'm not sure if the interviews were conducted well enough to get at the interesting bits, but some of the subjects are certainly very interesting mathematicians and people.* Joe Gallian runs the Duluth REU, a summer research program for undergraduates that is probably one of the most influential and successful (higher) math education programs in the last century. In short, he's very important not just as a mathematician but as an educator and trainer in research techniques.
* Dusa McDuff is not only a brilliant geometer, but also --- as one of relatively few women in her generation of mathematicians --- probably has quite interesting perspectives on the sociology of the discipline.
* Atle Selberg is nothing short of a giant in analytic number theory. As the interviews hopefully touched upon, when his work on the Riemann zeta function became known after communications were restored following the end of WWII, it was earth-shattering. (I heard a story that a typical conversation between analytic number theorists ca. 1946 would have gone as follows: "So, what happened during the war?" "Selberg".) His later work on automorphic forms (the Selberg Trace Formula) laid the foundations for much of the advances in number theory since the '60s, as it has allowed for progress in the Langlands Program.
