Underwood Dudley

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Underwood Dudley (born January 6, 1937 in New York City ) is an American mathematician and non-fiction author of mathematics.

Dudley studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1965 with William LeVeque ( The distribution modulo 1 of oscillating functions ). He taught for two years at Ohio State University and then from 1957 until his retirement in 2004 at DePauw University .

He has been editor of the College Mathematics Journal and the Phi Mu Epsilon Journal since 1996. He is the author of several popular science mathematics books for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), of which he was " Pólya Lecturer " in 1995 and from which he received the Trevor Evans Award for his books. He was also the editor of two series of mathematical books for the MAA.

Among other things, his books deal with angular three-parters , circular squares and other mathematical aberrations, which is why he was sued unsuccessfully by William Dilworth, an amateur mathematician, who believed he had refuted Cantor's diagonal proof and published about it in 1974 at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences. Dilworth, whom Dudley covered in his book Mathematical Cranks , was annoyed by the term crank , in English for fanatical owl or confused head . In the judgment, Judge Richard Posner also put forward the definition of a crank as a person who, for irrational reasons, is obsessed with an idea without a scientific basis , who, out of a temperament, wastes his time on an obviously misguided and hopeless train of thought .

Dudley has also written textbooks, for example on elementary number theory.

Fonts

  • The Trisectors , MAA 1996
  • Elementary Number Theory , Freeman, San Francisco 1978
  • Readings for Calculus , MAA 1993
  • The power of number. What numerology wants us to believe , Birkhäuser 1999 (English: Numerology, or What Pythagoras wrought, MAA 1997)
  • Mathematics between madness and joke , Birkhäuser 1995 (English original: Mathematical Cranks , MAA 1992)
  • Is Mathematics inevitable? A Miscellany , MAA 2008
  • with Owen O´Shea The magic numbers of the Professor , MAA 2007
  • A guide to elementary number theory , MAA 2010
  • A budget of trisections , Springer Verlag 1987

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Underwood Dudley in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / name used
  2. ↑ Judge Richard Posner's judgment of January 29, 1996 by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the process at Project Posner
  3. ↑ Literally in the judgment (loc. Cit.): A crank is a person inexplicably obsessed by an obviously unsound idea — a person with a bee in his bonnet. To call a person a crank is to say that because of some quirk of temperament he is wasting his time pursuing a line of thought that is plainly without merit or promise
personal data
SURNAME Dudley, Underwood
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City