Math magician biography

Home / General Biography Information / Math magician biography

His book The Almagest, is about math and astronomy, even though at the time, people thought the Earth was the center of the universe. 325–265 B.C.E.

If you’ve studied geometry, you’ve heard of Euclid. Tao’s work shows that there is still a lot to be discovered in math.

Learn more about Terence Tao at Britannica.

The laureation address by Nik Ruskuc, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, is given at THIS LINK

Diaconis is married to Susan Holmes, a professor of statistics at Stanford; they have two children, Camille and Emma.

Hypatia

Egypt, c. From there, the article gets even more compelling!

To calculate this, he used the noon shadow at midsummer at one point where the sun was so far away that the rays were parallel, then used the distance between two points on land to calculate the circumference. Harvard was one such place and Diaconis wanted to go there but doubted that the Mathematics Department would take a student with a City College degree.

The second is the life and times of a single example: random transpositions on the symmetric group. The article also highlights the use of spectral methods to deduce estimates for the length of the chain needed to achieve mixing. Diaconis replied:-

As a regular reader of expository articles, I am thrilled that mine seemed useful.

Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge.

But don't take our word for it, see what the experts say:

"[O]ne of the great intellects produced in this country in the 20th century"—Douglas Hofstadter

"Martin Gardner's contribution to contemporary intellectual culture is unique--in its range, its insight, and understanding of hard questions that matter"—Noam Chomsky

"[T]he single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us"—Stephen Jay Gould

"[He] brought more mathematics to more millions than anyone else"—Richard K.

Guy

What does Martin Gardner mean to you? In 1990 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto, giving the lecture Applications of group representations to statistical problems. Perhaps he is most famous for calculating the value of pi using the “method of exhaustion.” To do this, Archimedes drew a regular polygon outside a circle and a smaller polygon inside the circle.

Both were accurate and became well known during his lifetime. ... He was known as the Father of Geometry. Persi also taught himself magic tricks from the age of five and, as he grew up, this was a hobby which came to dominate his daily life. The first is an overview of a general approach to studying random walk on finite groups.

But Heron’s work did not stop there. The head of the statistics department at Harvard was Frederick Mosteller, who is a magic buff.