Constance Reid

Constance Reid
Born Constance Bowman
(1918-01-03)January 3, 1918
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died October 14, 2010(2010-10-14) (aged 92)
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation Mathematics popularizer and biographer
Nationality United States
Notable works From Zero to Infinity
Hilbert
Julia: A Life in Mathematics
Notable awards George Pólya Award
Beckenbach Book Prize
JPBM Communications Award
Spouse Neil D. Reid
Relatives Julia Robinson (sister)
Raphael M. Robinson (brother-in-law)

Constance Bowman Reid (January 3, 1918 – October 14, 2010)[1][2] was the author of several biographies of mathematicians and popular books about mathematics. She received several awards for mathematical exposition. She was not a mathematician but comes from a mathematical family: Her sister was Julia Robinson and her brother-in-law was Raphael M. Robinson.

Background and education

Reid was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Ralph Bowers Bowman and Helen (Hall) Bowman.[2] Her younger sister was the mathematician Julia Robinson. The family moved to Arizona and then to San Diego when the girls were a few years old. [3]:1,5 In 1950 she married a law student, Neil D. Reid, with whom she had two children, Julia and Stewart.[2] [4]:xiii

Reid received a Bachelor of Arts degree from San Diego State University in 1938 and a Master of Education degree from University of California, Berkeley in 1949. She worked as a teacher of English and journalism from 1939 to 1950, and as a free-lance writer since then.[2] She has said, "I always wanted to be a writer, but it took me a while to find my subject." [2]

Works

Reid's first published work was a memoir of her work in a World War II bomber factory, Slacks and Calluses, published in 1944. She also published a short story.[2]

Her first mathematical publication was an article on perfect numbers for Scientific American.[2] Reid remarked in an interview that some readers objected to her as an author: "But the readers (maybe, just one reader, I have forgotten now) objected that articles in Scientific American should be written by authorities in their fields and not by housewives!"[5]:272

The Scientific American article led to an invitation from Robert L. Crowell of the Thomas Y. Crowell Co. publishing house to write "a little book on numbers" [6] that became From Zero to Infinity. Two more popular math books for Crowell followed: Introduction to Higher Mathematics: For the General Reader in 1959 and A Long Way from Euclid in 1963.

After writing these books she felt she had run out of ideas, and her sister Julia Robinson suggested that she should update Eric Temple Bell's collection of mathematical biographies, Men of Mathematics.[7] :1488 After travelling to Göttingen to absorb some mathematical culture, Reid decided instead to write a full-length biography of David Hilbert, who she considered the greatest mathematician of the first half of the twentieth century.[7]:1489 Julia encouraged her in this project, and the biography was published in 1970 as Hilbert. The Hilbert biography was a success among mathematicians,[7]:1489 and her next book was a biography of another Göttingen figure, Richard Courant, published in 1976 as Courant in Göttingen and New York. Her next book, published in 1982, was a biography of the mathematical statistician Jerzy Neyman, who like Courant had emigrated to the United States and built a new career there.[5]:279

An attempt to write a biography of Eric Temple Bell proved unexpectedly difficult, as he had been very secretive about his early life. Reid discovered that Bell, a native of Scotland, as a young man had spent twelve years in the United States but had never revealed this to his wife or his son. The resulting book, The Search for E. T. Bell, published in 1993, is more of a detective story than a true biography.[2]:354

Her sister Julia gradually became more famous, and was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1976 and President of the American Mathematical Society in 1983. Several people had suggested to Constance that she write a biography of Julia, but Julia always refused to cooperate because she felt scientific biographies should be about science, not about personalities.[7]:1491 In 1985, when Julia was dying, she unbent enough to allow Constance to write a biographical sketch of her, that was published after Julia's death as "The Autobiography of Julia Robinson" (written by Constance but written in the first person as if by Julia) [7]:1491 The sketch was published with additional material as a book, Julia: A Life in Mathematics in 1996.

Awards

Reid won several awards for mathematical exposition. These include:

Publications

Notes

  1. ↑ http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/?pa=mathNews&sa=view&newsId=976
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Reid, Constance 1918–2010". Contemporary Authors 149 (New Revision Series ed.). Gale Research. 2006. pp. 353–355. ISBN 978-0-7876-7903-3.
  3. ↑ Reid, Constance (1996). Julia: A life in mathematics. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America. ISBN 0-88385-520-8.
  4. ↑ Reid, Constance (2006) [1955]. From Zero To Infinity (5th ed.). A K Peters. ISBN 978-1-56881-273-1.
  5. 1 2 Donald J. Albers and Gerald L. Alexanderson, ed. (1985). "Constance Reid". Mathematical People. Contemporary Books. pp. 269–280. ISBN 0-8092-4976-6.
  6. 1 2 "JPBM Communications Award Presented in Baltimore" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society) 45 (5): 612–613. May 1998. ISSN 0002-9920. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 "Being Julia Robinson's Sister" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society) 43 (12): 1486–1492. December 1996. ISSN 0002-9920. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
  8. ↑ "The Mathematical Association of America's George Pólya Award". Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
  9. ↑ "The Mathematical Association of America's Beckenbach Book Prize". Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved 2008-06-07.
  10. ↑ Stone, Marshall H. (1978). "Review of Courant in Göttingen and New York: The Story of an Improbable Mathematician by Constance Reid" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 84 (2): 234–241. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1978-14463-2.
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