Keith Devlin

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Keith Devlin (2011)

Keith J. Devlin (born March 16, 1947 in Kingston upon Hull ) is a British mathematician and science journalist .

He taught at various universities, including Germany and the USA . He is currently the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information and an Advisory Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University .

Devlin has been a columnist for The Guardian since 1983 . He produces successful programs on modern mathematics for the BBC . He is also a commentator on National Public Radio , where he works as "The Math Guy" ( Math Type is known). By 2011 he had published 31 books. In addition to his academic works, some are also written in popular science.

Since 2012 he has been giving free online courses on mathematical thinking on the Coursera learning platform .

Devlin has been politically active since the Snowden Revelations (2013); he learned that some of his math research was being used by intelligence agencies for illegal surveillance activities.

Since Donald Trump was elected US President, he has been speaking frequently on Twitter (@profkeithdevlin). Together with the politically very active mathematicians Edward Frenkel ( University of California, Berkeley ), John Allen Paulos and Jordan Ellenberg , he tries to stop Trump. He fears that Trump will use the technologies developed by mathematicians (e.g. to decipher encryption systems) to suppress the population.

Devlin is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Works

  • The Millennium Problems: the Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time (2003, ISBN 978-0465017300 )
  • The Math Gene: or How Mathematical Thinking Develops + Why You Can Calmly Forget Numbers (The Math Gene. How Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip) , Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2nd edition, Munich 2003, ISBN 3 -423-34008-8
  • The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible
  • Logic and Information . Cambridge University Press 1991
  • Mathematics: The Science of Patterns
  • The great moments of modern mathematics
  • Life by the Numbers . Wiley 1999, ISBN 978-0471328223
  • Pascal, Fermat and the calculation of happiness. A journey into the history of mathematics . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59099-3
  • The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution . Paperback 2012.
  • Finding Fibonacci - The Quest to Rediscover the Forgotten Mathematical Genius Who Changed the World . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ https://www.coursera.org/course/maththink
  2. ↑ a b spiegel.de: "He follows the path of a dictator"
  3. ↑ twitter.com/profkeithdevlin
  4. ^ Members list
  5. ↑ Fellows of the AAAS: Keith Devlin. (No longer available online.) American Association for the Advancement of Science, archived from the original on March 12, 2018 ; accessed on March 11, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.aaas.org
personal data
SURNAME Devlin, Keith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Devlin, Keith J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician and science journalist
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Kingston upon Hull