Constance Reid
Constance Bowman Reid (born January 3, 1918 in St. Louis , Missouri , † October 14, 2010 in San Francisco , California ) was an American author and maths historian. She was best known for her biographies of David Hilbert and Richard Courant .
Life
Reid is the daughter of Ralph Bowers Bowman and his wife Helen and the older sister of mathematician Julia Robinson . She grew up in Arizona and San Diego , where she attended university (Bachelor 1938). In 1949 she received her Masters degree in Education from the University of California, Berkeley . During the Second World War she worked in a bomber factory, about which she wrote her first book ( Slacks and Calluses , 1944).
After graduating, she worked as an English teacher and journalist and as a freelance writer. She also wrote about mathematics, first for Scientific American, then several popular mathematics books ( From Zero to Infinity , 1956, new edition 2006; Introduction to higher mathematics: for the general reader , 1959; A long way from Euclid , 1963, Dover 2004) at Crowell Publishing. At the suggestion of her sister, she then turned to mathematics historiography and researched a book about David Hilbert, for which she did numerous interviews and others. a. in Göttingen and which recorded many of the oral anecdotes that had to do with the Hilbert School. The book, published by Springer in 1970, was also a great success with mathematicians (an obituary for Hilbert by Hermann Weyl that was reprinted there illuminated Hilbert's mathematical side ). The biographies of the mathematician Richard Courant (from the Hilbert School) followed in 1976 and the statistician Jerzy Neyman in 1982 , both of which started new careers in the USA. Her book about the mathematician and well-known mathematician biographer ( Men of Mathematics ) Eric Temple Bell from 1993 turned out to be an extensive research work (Bell led a kind of double life ), which she also reproduces in her biography ( In search for ETBell - also known as John Taine ). In 1996 she wrote the biography of her sister Julia Robinson, a well-known mathematician (e.g. 1983 President of the American Mathematical Society), who had been seriously ill for a long time and died in 1985 ( Julia: a life in mathematics ), where she was the first person chose for their representation.
For her books, Reid u. a. 1987 the George Pólya Award of the Mathematical Association of America and its Beckenbach Book Prize (for her biography of Julia Robinsons).
She was married to lawyer Neil D. Reid since 1950 and has two children.
literature
- Interview in Albers, Alexanderson (Ed.): Mathematical People , Birkhäuser 1985 (Reid was also co-editor of the follow-up volume More Mathematical People , Academic Press 1994)
- Constance Reid: Being Julia Robinson's Sister . (PDF; 112 kB) Notices AMS, vol. 43, 1996, issue 12.
Individual evidence
Web links
- Gerald Alexanderson Remembering Constance Reid (1918-2010) , Notices AMS, November 2011
- Literature by and about Constance Reid in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Reid, Constance |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Reid, Constance Bowman (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American author and mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 3, 1918 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | St. Louis , Missouri |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 14, 2010 |
| Place of death | San Francisco , California |