Stewart, Ian 1945–

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Stewart, Ian 1945–

(Ian Nicholas Stewart)

PERSONAL: Born September 24, 1945, in Folkestone, England; son of Arthur Reginald and Marjorie Kathleen (Diwell) Stewart; married Avril Bernice Montgomery (a nurse), July 4, 1970; children: James Andrew, Christopher Michael. Education: Churchill College, Cambridge, B.A., 1966, M.A., 1969; University of Warwick, Ph.D., 1970. Politics: Labour Party. Hobbies and other interests: Guitar, geology, Egyptology, travel, science fiction, keeping fish.

ADDRESSES: Home—Coventry, England. Office—Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Rd., Coventry CV4 7AL, England. Agent—(for science fiction works) c/o Ashley Grayson, 1324 18th St., San Pedro, CA 90732; (for popular science) c/o Peter Tallack, Conville and Walsh, 2 Ganton St., London, W1F 7QL UK. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Warwick University, Coventry, England, lecturer, 1969–84, reader, 1984–90, professor of mathematics, 1990–, director of the Mathematics Awareness Centre at Warwick. University of Tübingen, Humboldt Foundation fellow, 1974; Auckland University, visiting fellow, 1976; University of Connecticut, Storrs, visiting associate professor, 1977–78; University of Illinois, Carbondale, visiting professor, 1978; University of Houston, Houston, TX, visiting professor, 1983–84, and has served as adjunct professor. Has appeared on BBC-Radio and on several British television programs, including The Magical Maze, Country Tracks, Chaos, Antichaos, Great Little Numbers, The Late Show, Reality on the Rocks, Esther, The Bride of Frankenstein, Sex and the Scientists, The Numbers Game, and Six Experiments that Changed the World; appeared on Future File, European Business News satellite channel; consultant to New Scientist and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

MEMBER: International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry, American Association for the Advancement of Science (fellow), American Mathematical Society, Mathematical Association of America, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Royal Society (fellow), Cambridge Philosophical Society, London Mathematical Society, Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, American Museum of Natural History, Planetary Society, International PEN, Gresham Society.

AWARDS, HONORS: Michael Faraday Medal, Royal Society, 1995; Rhone-Poulenc Prize for science books, 1998, for Shortlist; honorary doctorate, Westminster University, 1998, Universite Catholique du Louvain, Kingston University, Open University; Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award, 1999; Gold Medal, Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications, 2000; Chaos Award, Centre for Hyperincursion and Anticipation in Ordered Systems, 2001; Balaguer Prize (with M. Golubitsky), 2001; fellow of the Royal Society, 2001; Award for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2002; Hugo Award nomination, for The Science of Discworld.

WRITINGS:

(With J. Jaworski) Nut-Crackers, Piccolo/Pan Books (London, England), 1971.

Galois Theory, Chapman & Hall (New York, NY), 1973, 3rd edition, Chapman & Hall (Boca Raton, FL), 2004.

(With R.K. Amayo) Infinite-dimensional Lie Algebras, Nordhoff (Leyden, Netherlands), 1974.

Concepts of Modern Mathematics, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1975, revised edition, Dover (Mineola, NY), 1995.

(With J. Jaworski) Get Knotted!, Piccolo/Pan Books (London, England), 1976, abridged edition published as Get Knotted!: Lots of Things to Do with String, John Adams (Reading, England), 1980.

(With David Tall) The Foundations of Mathematics, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1977.

(With Tim Poston) Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications, Pitman (San Francisco, CA), 1978.

(With David Tall) Algebraic Number Theory, Chapman & Hall (London, England), 1979, 3rd edition published as Algebraic Number Theory and Fermat's Last Theorem, A.K. Peters (Natick, MA), 2002.

(With others) Aspects of Abstract Algebra, Open University Press (Milton Keynes, England), 1980.

(With J. Jaworski) Seven Years of MANIFOLD: 1968–1980, Shiva, 1981.

(And illustrator) Oh Catastrophe! (comic book), Librairie Classique Eugene Belin (Paris, France), 1982.

(And illustrator) Les Fractals (comic book), Librairie Classique Eugene Belin (Paris, France), 1982.

(And illustrator) An, les beaux groupes! (comic book), Librairie Classique Eugene Belin (Paris, France), 1983.

(With David Tall) Complex Analysis, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1983.

The Problems of Mathematics, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

(With M. Golubitsky and D. Schaeffer) Singularities and Groups in Bifurcation Theory, Volume 2, Springer Verlag (New York, NY), 1988.

Does God Play Dice?: The Mathematics of Chaos, Basil Blackwell (Oxford, England), 1989, 2nd edition published as Does God Play Dice?: The New Mathematics of Chaos, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2002.

Game, Set, and Math, Basil Blackwell (Oxford, England), 1989.

(With M. Golubitsky) Fearful Symmetry—Is God a Geometer?, Basil Blackwell (Oxford, England), 1992.

Another Fine Math You've Got Me Into …, W.H. Freeman (New York, NY), 1992, published with a foreword by Martin Gardner, Dover Publications (Mineola, NY), 2003.

(With Jack Cohen) The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, Viking (New York, NY), 1994.

Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1995.

From Here to Infinity, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Revisor) Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, What Is Mathematics?, new edition, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1996.

(With Jack Cohen) Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.

The Magical Maze: Seeing the World through Mathematical Eyes, Wiley (New York, NY), 1998.

Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World, Wiley (New York, NY), 1998.

(With Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett) The Science of Discworld, Edbury Press, 1999.

(With Jack Cohen) Wheelers (science fiction novel), Warner Aspect (New York, NY), 2000.

Flatterland: Like Flatland Only More So, Perseus Books (Cambridge, MA), 2001.

What Shape Is a Snowflake?: Magical Numbers in Nature, W.H. Freeman (New York, NY), 2001.

(Author of introduction and notes) Edwin A. Abbott, The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Perseus (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

(With Jack Cohen) Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, Ebury Press (London, England), 2002, published as What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, Wiley (Hoboken, NJ), 2002.

(With Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett) The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, Ebury (London, England), 2002.

(With Martin Golubitsky) The Symmetry Perspective: From Equilibrium to Chaos in Phase Space and Physical Space, Birkhäuser (Boston, MA), 2003.

(With Jack Cohen) Heaven (science fiction novel), Warner Books (New York, NY), 2004.

Math Hysteria: Fun and Games with Mathematics, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

(With others) The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty, and Power of Fractals (includes DVD), Clear Books, 2004.

(With Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett) The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, Ebury (London, England), 2005.

The Mayor of Uglyville's Dilemma, Atlantic Books (London, England), 2005.

Also author of scholarly articles, computer programming guides, and published lecture and research notes. Contributor of science fiction stories to Analog, Omni, and Interzone. Creator of computer software programs. Author of "Mathematical Recreations" column, Scientific American, 1990–2001.

Stewart's writings have been translated into Brazilian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

TRANSLATOR

Jean-Pierre Petit, Flight of Fancy, J. Murray (London, England), 1982, William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1985.

Jean-Pierre Petit, Informagic, J. Murray (London, England), 1982, published as Computer Magic, William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1985.

Jean-Pierre Petit, Euclid Rules OK?, J. Murray (London, England), 1982, published as Here's Looking at Euclid (and Not Looking at Euclid), William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1985.

Jean-Pierre Petit, The Black Hole, William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1985.

Jean-Pierre Petit, Everything Is Relative, William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1985.

Jean-Pierre Petit, Run, Robot, Run, William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1985.

Jean-Pierre Petit, Big Bang, William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1986.

Jean-Pierre Petit, The Silence Barrier, William Kaufmann (Los Altos, CA), 1986.

K.H. Becker and M. Doerfler, Dynamical Systems and Fractals, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1989.

SIDELIGHTS: British mathematician and educator Ian Stewart is a prolific author of books on mathematics. He has written works for the academic market, as well as titles that aim to explain the concepts and abstractions of math to the average lay reader. In his Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics Stewart discusses how mathematicians approach their work and explains that the field is merely a system of thought: a way of looking for patterns and then exploiting those patterns. He cites examples of such patterns as the dripping of water, or the spiral of a snail shell, and then explains their relation to mathematical laws. As the book progresses, Stewart leads readers toward the new frontiers in math, such as chaos theory. "Stewart is the soul of clarity," maintained Booklist contributor Gilbert Taylor. The book also won praise from a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, who stated that "Stewart gives the reader an uncanny feel for the way mathematicians think"; the reviewer further commended his "elegant narrative."

Stewart has written several works with Jack Cohen, a biologist and British television personality. In their first collaboration, 1994's The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, the authors discuss "the law of nature" question, and advocate the end of scientific reductionism, a theory that "reduc[es] behavior to the interactions of the smallest entity," explained Taylor in another Booklist review, which "has brought forth great advances in biology, chemistry, and physics." Stewart and Cohen argue that such thinking is now obsolete, and no new discoveries seem possible. They offer the terms "simplexity" and "complicity" instead, and along the way debunk the theory that DNA is the "blueprint for life."

Stewart and Cohen once again teamed up for 1997's Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind. They assert that the human mind evolved in order to respond to the complexity of the natural world, posit that evolution itself is related to the evolution of the human mind, and assert that one is not possible without the other. Library Journal critic Mark L. Shelton called it "a delightful but heavy read" and praised the authors as "witty, erudite, [and] clever."

Stewart's The Magical Maze: Seeing the World through Mathematical Eyes is based on a lecture he delivered at the Royal Institute in 1997. Discussing flower petals, colonies of amoeba, and swarms of flies, the mathematician argues that such natural phenomena are examples of chaos theory and symmetry in nature. "The book patiently takes readers from seemingly bewildering random sets of numbers to the elegant principles that lie behind them," a Publishers Weeklyreview remarked. Again, the author won praise for his ability to explain such concepts for the less mathematically inclined. Stewart, noted Booklist contributor Bryce Christensen, "knows how to cast the spell over readers who normally regard" the subject of mathematics with "indifference or distaste."

In Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World Stewart more fully develops his contention that DNA does not hold all the answers as to how and why life replicates itself. He maintains that the codes contained in our genes are inactive until the right combination of chemistry and physics is present. "Nurture, in other words, is no less structured than nature, and Stewart steers us expertly through a series of beautiful examples from both the plant and animal kingdoms to prove his point," observed Science reviewer Sunetra Gupta. Life's Other Secret also discusses the work of D'Arcy Thompson, a forgotten zoologist who began writing about the "geometry of life" early in the twentieth century. Patterns in the natural world such as snowflakes and butterfly wings are not at all random, Stewart contends in writing about this geometry. Life's Other Secret earned positive reviews from several critics. "Stewart writes with style and verve, displaying an impressive command of mathematics," stated Library Journal critic Gloria Maxwell, while in Booklist, Christensen remarked that the author "writes with such compelling clarity" that a lay reader "can share in the intellectual daring of his perspective."

Stewart and Cohen teamed up for a literary project of a different kind with Wheelers, the first novel for both writers. In this science fiction tale, a twenty-third-century junior archaeologist named Prudence Odingo decodes a secret inscription on the Sphinx, but her colleague and former lover takes all the credit. Dismayed, she travels to Jupiter for solace, where she finds the "wheeler," a gear-shaped artifact that comes to life. The presence of an unknown alien civilization becomes apparent, and Odingo realizes that they are able to redirect the orbits of Jupiter's moons. When a large comet heads toward the Earth because of this, Odingo and her former foe must avert it. This involves communicating with the blimplike beings who reside in large cities inside Jupiter's atmosphere. The aliens must be convinced that the Earth—which they have deemed "Poisonblue"—really does support life with its oxygen-laden atmosphere. A sect of asteroid miners who practice Tibetan Buddhism also figure into the plot, as does Odingo's nephew Moses, who possesses special abilities. A Publishers Weekly reviewer found that though Stewart and Cohen's characterizations and descriptions of a different world "lack believability, the authors wield scientific speculation with cheerful abandon, providing some real old-fashioned sense of wonder." Gerald Jonas, writing in the New York Times Book Review, termed Wheelers an "ambitious and entertaining novel," while Booklist contributor Eric Robbins echoed the sentiment in terming it an "imaginative and well-written story."

Collaborating again to write another novel, Heaven, in 2004, Stewart and Cohen set a tale in the far future that focuses on two men: Second-Best Sailor and Servant-of-Unity XIV Samuel. The former is a nomadic trader from the planet of No-Moon; the latter is a missionary of Cosmic Unity, a church that wants to unite all of the races of the universe in peace. The church of Cosmic Unity's other mission is to prevent potentially dangerous, highly advanced artifacts left behind by the extinct Precursor race from falling into the hands of those who might use them as weapons; the relics are so powerful that their misuse could destroy all of civilization. While Cosmic Unity's goals are noble, their methods bring a great deal of suffering to the people of No-Moon. "Apparently the reverse of the old saying is true," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer: "for evil to triumph, it's only necessary for good men to try to do everything." Although Heaven tackles big ideas, it is "seasoned with touches of good humor," Don D'Ammassa noted in Chronicle, and provides "a consistently pleasant journey into the imaginations of the authors."

Stewart has also created an annotated version of Edwin A. Abbott's science fiction classic Flatland, which was first published in 1884. The story is set in a two-dimensional world populated by flat geometric shapes. Here, one's social class is determined by the number of sides one's shape has. The protagonist, A. Square, is introduced to the world of three dimensions when he meets Sphere in a parable that helped to popularize the concept being developed at the time that there might be a fourth dimension. "Stewart's notes [in The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions] bring a welcome new level to Abbott's classic," Robert K.J. Killheffer noted in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The notes flesh out Abbott as a person, describe how he conceived of the idea for the book, and explain the math used in the text, Killheffer explained. "Perhaps most valuably, they place Abbott and his book solidly in their social and cultural context," wrote Killheffer, showing how then-prominent mathematicians and even Communist philosopher Karl Marx are connected to the tale.

Around the same time he released the annotated book, Stewart published his own sequel to Flatland titled Flatterland: Like Flatland Only More So. Like the original Flatland, this book teaches mathematical concepts to a popular audience from the perspective of a geometric shape with a human mind—in this case, Victoria "Vikki" Line, who is the great-great-granddaughter of A. Square. Stewart covers many new theories about geometry, space, and time that have been developed since 1884, including superstring theory, the idea that there may be as many as ten dimensions, relativity, black holes, and quantum mechanics. "The breadth of material is astonishing," Michael Goldberg wrote in Isis. Stewart also scatters humor and pop-cultural references throughout his tale, including allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the British pop group the Spice Girls, and the film The Wizard of Oz. With the combination of science and humor, "Flatterland provides an engaging, completely accessible guide to some of the trickiest concepts in contemporary mathematics," concluded a Science News reviewer.

Stewart once told CA: "As a child I always enjoyed both writing and mathematics. My father once found an old typewriter in a bank vault, and I and my circle of friends spent a lot of time using it to produce such items as a humorous dictionary of mathematics, a humorous epic poem some 500 verses long, and rules for new card games. I was also interested in science, especially physics, and I devoured Scientific American and New Scientist. I was an avid fan of Martin Gardner's 'Mathematical Games' column in Scientific American and compiled a lengthy series of notebooks on mathematical recreations.

"An offer to study mathematics at Churchill College, Cambridge, settled my future career, but I continued writing as a sideline. I edited (and wrote large chunks of) student mathematics magazines at Cambridge and Warwick. My first 'real' book was Galois Theory, a textbook that [was] still in print after [two decades]. Soon after, I wrote up an extramural lecture series as Concepts of Modern Mathematics, a first attempt at writing for a 'lay' audience. For some reason, I was sidetracked into writing textbooks. I was rescued from this blind alley by two things. The first was the craze for personal computers. With a friend, I began writing a series of books about how to program the beasts, at a peak rate of one book every six weeks. The second was a suggestion from Ravi Mirchandani at Penguin Books that I should write a popular book on 'chaos theory.' The result was Does God Play Dice?: The Mathematics of Chaos, which … has been translated into nine foreign languages.

"My fingers start to itch unless they are somewhere near a word processor keyboard. I find it difficult to take the world seriously—how could any rational mind make sense of it?—and much of my output has humorous aspects. I have written and drawn three comic books on mathematics which were published in French. As the writer of the 'Mathematical Recreations' column in Scientific American, I incorporate mathematical ideas into brief stories with improbable characters, such as the Worm family—father Henry, mother Anna-Lida, baby Wermentrude, and friend Albert Wormstein. I believe that it is possible to be serious about science without being solemn. I am afflicted with an evangelical streak which drives me to explain to the rest of the world those parts of mathematics and science that, at any given moment, I find interesting. I am attracted to writing because it's the only way you can have fun, improve the sum total of human understanding, and make money all at the same time. But mostly I write because my head is filled with sequences of words, trying desperately to get out."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June, 2003, Tom Easton, review of What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, p. 134.

Booklist, February 15, 1994, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, p. 1041; June 1, 1995, Gilbert Taylor, review of Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics, p. 1708; February 15, 1998, Bryce Christensen, review of Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World, p. 958; April 15, 1998, Bryce Christensen, review of The Magical Maze: Seeing the World through Mathematical Eyes, p. 405; August, 2000, Eric Robbins, review of Wheelers, p. 2126; May 15, 2001, Gilbert Taylor, review of Flatterland: Like Flatland Only More So, p. 1739.

Chronicle, June, 2004, Don D'Ammassa, review of Heaven, p. 41.

Entertainment Weekly, June 11, 2004, Noah Robischon, review of Heaven, p. 129.

Isis, December, 2001, Michael Goldberg, review of Flatterland, p. 751; December, 2002, Robert Kaplan, review of The Annotated Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, p. 711.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2000, review of Wheelers, p. 1321.

Library Journal, October 15, 1997, Mark L. Shelton, review of Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind, p. 88; January, 1998, Gloria Maxwell, review of Life's Other Secret, p. 136; May 15, 2004, Jackie Cassada, review of Heaven, p. 118.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August, 2002, Robert K.J. Killheffer, review of The Annotated Flatland, p. 22.

Mathematics Teacher, September, 2002, Catherine A. Gorini, review of Algebraic Number Theory and Fermat's Last Theorem, p. 470.

Natural History, February, 2002, review of What Shape Is a Snowflake?: Magical Numbers in Nature, p. 76.

New Scientist, October 5, 2002, David Langford, review of Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, p. 50; October 12, 2002, Andrew Bowler, review of Algebraic Number Theory and Fermat's Last Theorem, p. 52; September 18, 2004, Kenneth Falconer, review of The Colours of Infinity, p. 46.

New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1994, Ed Regis, "The World Made Easy"; November 12, 2000, Gerald Jonas, review of Wheelers.

Publishers Weekly, February 28, 1994, review of The Collapse of Chaos, p. 67; July 10, 1995, review of Nature's Numbers, p. 51; March 2, 1998, review of The Magical Maze, p. 53; October 16, 2000, review of Wheelers, p. 53; April 2, 2001, review of Flatterland, p. 43; November 26, 2001, review of The Annotated Flatland, p. 55; April 26, 2004, review of Heaven, p. 46.

School Library Journal, November, 2001, Sheila Shoup, review of Flatterland, p. 194.

Science, April 3, 1998, Sunetra Gupta, review of Life's Other Secret, p. 54; February 22, 2002, Coimbra Sirica, "Scientists Honored at 2002 Annual Meeting," p. 1543.

Science News, December 15, 2001, Cait Goldberg, review of What Shape Is a Snowflake?, p. 370; February 1, 2003, review of Flatterland, p. 80.