Brief description of some recent Brownian motion through books:
A little while ago I read Morris Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, which I loved. Somewhere within it, he sang the praises of Philip Davis’s The Mathematical Experience; I think Kline said that Davis’s book was the greatest book ever written on the experience of doing mathematics. So I filed it away on ye olde wish list.
So we come to today, when I find myself bored with all the books available to me. This happens occasionally. The usual trick out of this is to read something by John McPhee. (I’d recommend The Curve of Binding Energy, about nuclear weapons manufacturing and the men who do it. I’d also recommend Uncommon Carriers, about the people who carry packages for us. I would also recommend almost everything else by McPhee, though I couldn’t get into his geology books. Perhaps I’ll give them another try because, outside of Annals of the Former World, he’s batted 1.000 with me.) Without any McPhee (that I hadn’t already read) to hand today, though, and having not found him in my wish list, I looked for something that a) would likely grab my interest and b) was available at the beautiful Cambridge Public Library. The Davis book satisfied both criteria (as did Lives of a Cell), so I went to pick it up.
My memory called forth a book called The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions, which I thought might be by the same Davis. (Turns out it was Martin Davis.) This led me to ask the Wiki about Philip Davis. Turns out he won a prize for “an outstanding expository article on a mathematical topic”. Turns out that paper is a historical profile of the Γ function.
The paper is just so fun and engagingly written, and it makes me all the more excited to dive into The Mathematical Experience. Anyone with some college calculus under his or her belt, and some interest in the history of mathematics, will love Davis’s paper. I highly recommend it.
A permission error awaits a clicker of the link to the paper, sadly: “Forbidden. You don’t have permission to access /paperstoread/leonhardeulersintegral-ahistoricalprofileofthegamma_function.pdf on this server.”
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Ah ha! Try now.
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I am currently writing a paper on social welfare functions in climate change economics. I think I want you to read it (when it’s done)–maybe I’ll even come to Cambridge to talk it all over with you–and then we can write up an engaging version together. I don’t have college calculus under my belt, so I can learn from Davis as you can.
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can’t. I can’t learn from Davis as you can.
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That did it.
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I like that you can read my comment either as a response to Paul or to Steve.
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A very nice paper indeed! I’ll take a look at the other Chauvenet Prize winners, too: perhaps there are more gems out there.
And perhaps it’s time to pick up Bak and Newman again. I am yet to learn complex analysis properly.
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I found one already: Mark Kac’s famous paper, “Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?” Emanuel Derman (of My Life as a Quant fame) claimed Kac’s talk on the subject, delivered in New York City when Derman was a graduate student, was the best he had heard in his life.
On the subject of Kac and autobiographies, you may be interested in Kac’s own account, Enigmas of Chance. His life appears in some ways representative of the European scientists who fled to the United States in the dark decades 1914–1945.
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