Constance Reid

Based on new research on Eric Temple Bell, who also wrote science fiction under pseudonym. Includes portraits of other mathmatician, collegues & friends.

Almost twenty-five years after his death, Richard Courant remains a highly controversial figure. The deep affection he inspired among friends, colleagues and students is still matched by distrust and dislike in much of the mathematical community. He was a man of such contradictions in character and action that one of his colleagues, resorting to an accepted mathematical method of proof, claimed "by contradiction" that he simply did not exist. But exist he did. On April 1, 1933, he was an internationally famous and influential German professor, the director of the first institute in the world devoted entirely to mathematics, a trusted adviser of the education ministry, a successful author and editor, a man surrounded by a mathematical family of gifted students. Eight days later, he was dismissed from his position by the Nazis. Through friends, he obtained a modest position in the United States at a university with no mathematical reputation whatsoever. What followed - the founding and development of one of America's most important centers of applied mathematics, the Courant Institute at New York University - is one of the great success stories of mathematics.

If the life of any 20th century mathematician can be said to be a history of mathematics in his time, it is that of David Hilbert. To the enchanted young mathematicians and physicists who flocked to study with him in Gottingen before and between the World Wars, he seemed mathematics personified, the very air around him "scientifically electric." His remarkably prescient proposal in 1900 of twenty-three problems for the coming century set the course of much subsequent mathematics and remains a feat that no scientist in any field has been able to duplicate. When he died, Nature remarked that there was scarcely a mathematician in the world whose work did not derive from that of Hilbert. Constance Reid's classic biography is a moving, nontechnical account of the passionate scientific life of this man - from the early days in Konigsberg, when his revolutionary work was dismissed as "theology," to the golden years in Gottingen before Hitler came to power and within a few months destroyed the entire Hilbert school. The Copernicus paperback edition makes this book available to new generations of mathematicians who know the name Hilbert, which is everywhere in mathematics, but do not know the man.

Jerzy Neyman received the National Medal of Science "for laying the foundations of modern statistics and devising tests and procedures that have become essential parts of the knowledge of every statistician." Until his death in 1981 at the age of 87, Neyman was vigorously involved in the concerns and controversies of the day, a scientist whose personality and activity were integral parts of his contribution to science. Through conversations with Neyman as well as the author's access to his personal and professional letters and papers, this book presents the life story of the statistician.