Review
In this wonderful book real people ride imagined trajectories, poles and eigenvalues consort, and love has a way of coming to mathematicians. Great fun! --Roald Hoffmann, chemist and writer
About the Author
Chandler Davis has been on the faculty of the mathematics department at the University of Toronto since 1962. He has been an editor of Mathematical Reviews and a Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society. His mathematical research ranges quite widely. His (non-mathematical) prose has appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction, The Nation, and elsewhere; selecta will be published as
It Walks in Beauty (edited by J. Lukin; Aqueduct Press). His poetry has appeared in Canadian Forum, Saturday Night, This Magazine, and various little magazines. Combining his personae as mathematician and wordsmith, he has been on the editorial team of
The Mathematical Intelligencer since 1987.
Marjorie Wikler Senechal, a geometer and writer, is Louise Wolf Kahn Professor Emerita in Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College, where among other things she served as the (founding) Director of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute. Her many books include Quasicrystals and Geometry, Shaping Space (a second edition is in preparation), and outside of mathematics Long Life to Your Children! A Portrait of High Albania, and American Silk 1830 1930. Marjorie collaborated with Ellen Maddow on Delicious Rivers, and is, with Chandler Davis, co-Editor-in-Chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer.
Jan Zwicky, a musician and a poet, also teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of Victoria. She has published seven collections of poetry, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which won Canada s Governor General s Award in 1999, and Robinson s Crossing, which won the Dorothy Livesay Prize in 2004. Her books on philosophy include Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. She has also published widely on issues in music, poetry, and the environment.
