Derbyshire, John 1945-

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Derbyshire, John 1945-

PERSONAL:

Born 1945.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Long Island, NY. Office— National Review, 215 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10016. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, critic, commentator, columnist, and magazine journalist. Freelance journalist, 1983—. Has worked as a teacher and computer programmer.

WRITINGS:

Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream (novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1996.

Fire from the Sun (novel), Xlibris (Philadelphia, PA), 2001.

Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, Joseph Henry Press (Washington, DC), 2003.

Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, Joseph Henry Press (Washington, DC), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including New Criterion.

Author of column, "The Straggler," and contributing editor, National Review 2003 —.

Selector, arranger, and author of introduction for Thirty-six Great American Poems.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Derbyshire is an author, journalist, critic, and novelist. "His words are stated in a genial voice of reason," commented interviewer Bernard Chapin on Enter Stage Right. "The one quality that sets him apart from his peers is his overwhelming sincerity. It comes through in just about everything that he publishes," Chapin stated. Writing on his home page, Derbyshire also describes himself as a "popmath author" whose writings help to popularize and simplify mathematics and associated concepts for general, nonscientific audiences. An example of Derbyshire's work in this vein is Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra, which a Publishers Weekly reviewer described as a "very real and very entertaining survey of the development of algebra." Derbyshire is also the author of Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, a biographical history of mathematician Riemann and an explanation of the most celebrated unsolved problem in modern mathematics. In 1859 Riemann devised a formula for counting prime numbers (numbers divisible only by themselves and one), but proving the formula has escaped mathematicians for almost a century and a half. Derbyshire "sets out to explain the hypothesis, how it relates to a deep and fascinating fact about prime numbers, and how it connects to many other far-flung parts of mathematics and physics," noted David Gelernter in the National Review.

With his book on Riemann's hypothesis, Derbyshire "elegantly explores a vexing topic," noted a reviewer in Science News. "This is a striking and brilliant book, … the most ambitious science-for-the-public attempt I have ever read," commented Gelernter. Derbyshire "undertakes a task which is (we are more or less convinced by the end) impossible, and yet the book succeeds, and at its best it is beautiful," Gelernter stated. "It reads as if it were written not merely by a mathematics scholar but by a first-rate novelist—and that is what Derbyshire is."

Derbyshire's first novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, is the story of Chai, a determined Chinese man who risks his life to flee China by swimming four perilous miles to Hong Kong. There he learns the ways of banking and finance and falls in love with a woman named Selina, only to lose her to an arranged marriage in America. Chai himself travels to America to begin a new life. There, with his wife, Ding, his daughter, Hetty, and their dog, Jip, he is content in middle age. However, "the reappearance of Selina in his life, which constitutes the essence of the novel's slight plot, not surprisingly sends him into a fairly typical male midlife idiocy spiral," observed John Burnham Schwartz in the New York Times. For Chai, the solution to his problem comes not in self-examination or from his family but from the life and words of U.S. president Calvin Coolidge, "the embodiment of all he finds good about America," noted Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post Book World. Yardley called Derbyshire's novel "an absolute delight, a small but rich book in which every note is struck exactly right, a book one reads mesmerized, so hypnotic is the wry, self-effacing yet insistent voice in which it is narrated." The book "is so good that it shows no signs of being a first novel," Yardley remarked.