Ian Stewart (mathematician)

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Ian Stewart, FRS (b. 1945), is a professor of mathematics at University of Warwick, United Kingdom.

Contents

1 Biography
2 Bibliography
3 Criticism

3.1 Books authored or co-authored by Ian Stewart

4 Select quotations
5 External links

Biography

Ian Stewart was born in 1945 in England. His father's position as a messenger at a bank afforded a modest lifestyle for the family, but not one that would normally be expected to lead to the lofty heights Stewart has achieved. While in school, however, in sixth form, Stewart came to the attention of the mathematics teacher. The teacher had Stewart sit mock A-level examinations without any preparation along with the seventh-form students; Stewart placed first in the examination. This teacher arranged for Stewart to be admitted to Cambridge on a scholarship to Churchill College, where he obtained a BA in Mathematics. Stewart then went to the University of Warwick for his PhD, on completion of which he was offered an academic position. He is now Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick.

Stewart has held visiting academic positions in Germany (1974), New Zealand (1976), and the USA (University of Connecticut 1977–78, University of Houston 1983-84).

In 1995 Stewart received the Michael Faraday Medal and in 1997 he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2001.

He has collaborated with Dr Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett on three "Science of Discworld" books. In 1999 Terry Pratchett made both Jack Cohen and Professor Ian Stewart "Honorary Wizards of the Unseen University" at the same ceremony at which the University of Warwick gave Terry Pratchett an honorary degree.

Stewart has published over 140 scientific papers.

Stewart married Avril in 1970. They met at a party at a house Avril was renting while she trained as a nurse. They have two sons.

Bibliography

Ian Stewart has published in many journals including Scientific American, New Scientist, and Nature. He has also authored or co-authored many books.

Criticism

While text books he's authored and co-authored are, in general, well structured and make more than occasional attempt at humour, they are riddled with an inordinate amount of typographical errors. ("Algebraic Number Theory and Fermat's Last Theorem" 3rd Ed., "Galois Theory" 3rd Ed.)

Books authored or co-authored by Ian Stewart

Another Fine Math You've Got Me Into
Concepts of Modern Mathematics
Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos
Game, Set and Math
Fearful Symmetry
Figments of Reality, with Jack Cohen
Flatterland, ISBN 0738204420, Perseus Books Group, April 2001. (See Flatland)
From Here to Infinity, first published as The Problems of Mathematics
Life's Other Secret
Math Hysteria, ISBN 0198613369, Oxford University Press, June 2004
Nature's Numbers
The Collapse of Chaos, with Jack Cohen
The Magical Maze
The Problems of Mathematics
The Science of Discworld, with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
, with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
, with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
What is Mathematics? – originally by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, second edition by Ian Stewart
Wheelers, with Jack Cohen (fiction)
Heaven, with Jack Cohen, ISBN 0446529834, Aspect, May 2004
, with Jack Cohen. Second edition published as What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life
Letters to a Young Mathematician, ISBN 0465082319, Basic Books, May 2006
Algebraic number theory and Fermat's last theorem 3rd Edition, I. Stewart, D Tall. A. K. Peters (2002) ISBN 1-56881-119-5
Galois Theory 3rd Edition, Chapman and Hall (2000) ISBN 1-58488-393-6

Select quotations

From What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life

"[S]cience is the best defence against believing what we want to."

From Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos on the concept of fungibility and how it applies to science:

"Lawyers have a concept known as 'Fungibility'. Things are fungible if substituting one for another has no legal implications. For example, cans of baked beans with the same manufacturer and the same nominal weight are fungible: you have no legal complaint if the shop substitutes a different can when the assistant notices that the one you've just bought is dented. The fact that the new can contains 1,346 beans, whereas the old one contained 1,347, is legally irrelevant.

That's what `take as given' means, too. Explanations that climb the reductionist hierarchy are cascades of fungibilities. Such explanations are comprehensible, and thus convincing, only because each stage in the story relies only upon particular simple features of the previous stage. The complicated details a level or two down do not need to be carried upwards indefinitely. Such features are intellectual resting-points in the chain of logic. Examples include the observation that atoms can be assembled into many complex structures, making molecules possible, and the complicated but elegant geometry of the DNA double helix that permits the `encoding' of complex `instructions' for making organisms. The story can then continue with the computational abilities of DNA coding, onward and upward to goats, without getting enmeshed in the quantum wave functions of amino acids.

What we tend to forget, when told a story with this structure, is that it could have had many different beginnings. Anything that lets us start from the molecular level would have done just as well. A totally different subatomic theory would be an equally valid starting-point for the story, provided it led to the same general feature of a replicable molecule. Subatomic particle theory is fungible when viewed from the level of goats. It has to be, or else we would never be able to keep a goat without first doing a Ph.D. in subatomic physics."

External links

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