Rockmore, Daniel N. 1961–

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Rockmore, Daniel N. 1961–

(Daniel Nahum Rockmore)

PERSONAL: Born December 5, 1961, in Boston, MA; son of Ronald Marshall and Miriam (Miller) Rockmore. Education: Princeton University, A.B. (cum laude), 1984; Harvard University, M.A., 1986, Ph.D., 1989.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of Computer Science, 6211 Sudikoff Laboratory, Dartmouth University, Hanover, NH 03755-3510.

CAREER: Mathematician, educator, and writer. Thinking Machines Corporation, Waltham, MA, research scientist, 1986; Columbia University, New York, NY, assistant professor of mathematics, 1989–91; Dart-mouth College, Hanover, NH, assistant professor, 1991–96, associate professor of mathematics, 1996–2000, professor and vice chairman of Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, 1999–, member of faculty of Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, 1999–. Visiting scientist at International Business Machines, 1989; member of Institute for Advanced Study, 1995–96, 2002; member of external faculty, Santa Fe Institute, 2000; member of panels and committees of National Science Foundation; member of board of Defense Science Study Group, Institute of Defense Analyses, 2000–2002; member of scientific advisory board of Poindexter Systems; contributor to Vermont Public Radio. Visiting educator at Harvard University, 1992; University of Chicago, 1992–93; National Center for Atmospheric Research, 1997–99; Santa Fe Institute, 1999, 2000–01, 2003; and New York University, 2000, 2000–02. Contributor to documentary films, including The Math Life, Films for the Humanities and Sciences; and Living Math.

MEMBER: American Mathematical Society, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fulbright fellow, 1984; National Science Foundation fellow, 1985–87, postdoctoral fellow, 1991–93, and Presidential Faculty fellow, 1995–2000; IBM graduate fellow, 1989; Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer, 2005–07; research grants from National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Dennis M. Healy, Jr.) Modern Signal Processing, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis: The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor of articles to professional journals, including Nature Neuroscience, Advances in Applied Mathematics, and Journal of Physics. Contributor to periodicals, including Chronicle of Higher Education, Dallas Morning News, and New York Times. Contributor to books including Cycle Renormalization and Automorphism Groups of Rooted Trees, Springer-Verlag (New York, NY), 1996; Music and Computers: A Theoretical and Historical Approach Key Publishing; and From Groups to GUTs: A Symmetry-Based Approach to Grand and Unified Theories, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ). Editor of special issue of Journal of Symbolic Computation focusing on algebra and signal processing; contributor to exhibition catalogs.

SIDELIGHTS: Mathematician Daniel N. Rockmore is the author of Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis: The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers. This book is meant for a lay audience and focuses on the history of a 150-year-old unsolved math problem that was presented by Bernhard Riemann in 1859. Since a solution for Fermat's last theorem has been developed, Riemann's math problem has become the most tantalizing problem in the field of mathematics. The problem focuses on the distribution of prime numbers and, as noted by the author on the Dartmouth University Department of Computer Science Web site, its "solution gets to the heart of [our] understanding of the way in the which the prime numbers are distributed among the integers."

In his book, Rockmore discusses the history of the problem and then focuses in on recent attempts to solve it, attempts that have been bolstered by the offer of a prize of one million dollars by the Clay Mathematics Institute. In addition to writing about the hypothesis, the author also provides short biographies of famous mathematicians who have focused on prime numbers, including Adrien-Marie Legendre and Carl Freidrich Gauss. Writing in Booklist, Jared Wunsch noted that the "book provides an engaging introduction to the problem," adding that it is "a lively account of one of the central problems of modern science." A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that "Rock-more writes elegantly and makes ample use of analogy," while in Science News a reviewer called Rockmore's effort a "math-dense but straightforward book" and noted that the author "reveals the complex computations of the hypothesis and the attempts at its proof."