Constance Reid - Böcker

"...a story of great mathematicians and their achievements, of practical successes and failures, and of human perfidy and generosity...this is one of the still too rare occasions in which mathematicians are shown as frail, flesh-and-blood creatures...a very worthwhile book." -CHOICE

Now in new trade paper editions, these classic biographies of two of the greatest 20th Century mathematicians are being released under the Copernicus imprint. These noteworthy accounts of the lives of David Hilbert and Richard Courant are closely related: Courant's story is, in many ways, seen as the sequel to the story of Hilbert. Originally published to great acclaim, both books explore the dramatic scientific history expressed in the lives of these two great scientists and described in the lively, nontechnical writing style of Contance Reid.

I am very pleased that my books about David Hilbert, published in 1970, and Richard Courant, published in 1976, are now being issued by Springer­ Verlag in a single volume. I have always felt that they belonged together, Courant being, as I have written, the natural and necessary sequel to Hilbert­ the rest of the story. To make the two volumes more compatible when published as one, we have combined and brought up to date the indexes of names and dates. U nfortu­ nately we have had to omit Hermann Weyl's article on "David Hilbert and his mathematical work," but the interested reader can always find it in the hard­ back edition of Hilbert and in Weyl's collected papers. At the request of a number of readers we have included a listing of all of Hilbert's famous Paris problems. It was, of course, inevitable that we would give the resulting joint volume the title Hilbert-Courant.

Jerzy Neyman received the National Medal of Science "for laying the foundations of modern statistics and devising tests and procedures that have become essential parts of the knowledge of every statistician." Until his death in 1981 at the age of eighty-seven, he was vigorously involved in the concerns and controversies of the day, a teaching professor at the University of California, and the directory of the Berkeley Statistical Laboratory. Neyman was a scientist whose personality and activity were integral parts of his contribution to his science. His career is thus particulary well-suited for the nontechnical scientific life-story which Constance Reid has made her own in such well-received biographies of scientists Hilbert and Courant in Goettingen and New York. She was able to talk extensively with Neyman and to have access to his personal and professional letters and papers. Her book will appeal to the professional statistician as well as to the layman who would like to learn something of a subject which permeates almost every aspect of modern life.

Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960) was a distinguished mathematician and a best selling popularizer of mathematics. His Men of Mathematics, still in print after almost sixty years, inspired scores of young readers to become mathematicians. Under the name of John Taine, he also published science fiction novels (among them The Time Stream, Before the Dawn, and The Crystal Horde) that served to broaden the subject matter of that genre during its early years.In The Search for E. T. Bell, Constance Reid has given us a compelling account of this complicated, difficult man who never divulged to anyone, not even to his wife and son, the story of his early life and family background. Her book is thus more of a mystery than a traditional biography. It begins with the discovery of an unexpected inscription in an English churchyard and a series of cryptic notations in a boy's schoolbook. Then comes an inadvertent revelation, by Bell himself, in a respected mathematical journal. You will have to read the book to learn the rest.

From Zero to Infinity is a combination of number lore, number history, and sparkling descriptions of the simply stated but exceedingly difficult problems posed by the most ordinary numbers that first appeared in 1955 and has been kept in print continuously ever since. With the fifth edition this classic has been updated to report on advances in number theory over the last 50 years, including the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Deceptively simple in style and structure, it is a book to which the reader will return again and again, gaining greater understanding and satisfaction with each reading.

From Zero to Infinity is a combination of number lore, number history, and sparkling descriptions of the simply stated but exceedingly difficult problems posed by the most ordinary numbers that first appeared in 1955 and has been kept in print continuously ever since. With the fifth edition this classic has been updated to report on advances in number theory over the last 50 years, including the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Deceptively simple in style and structure, it is a book to which the reader will return again and again, gaining greater understanding and satisfaction with each reading.