Noel Weichbrodt on A Mathematician’s Lament

Link to Paper: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

Description: “So let me try to explain what mathematics is, and what mathematicians do.” So begins the photocopied rant on intuitionism in mathematics education by a college dropout. Passed around at conferences, the rant is eventually published as a column by the Mathematical Association of America, and then as a book. The range of the rant is as wide and wild as the author: Paul Lockhart became interested in mathematics when he was 14 (outside of the school math class, he points out) and read voraciously, becoming especially interested in analytic number theory. He dropped out of college after one semester to devote himself to math, supporting himself by working as a computer programmer and as an elementary school teacher. Eventually he started working with Ernst Strauss at UCLA, and the two published a few papers together. Strauss introduced him to Paul Erdos, and they somehow arranged it so that he became a graduate student there. He ended up getting a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, and went on to be a fellow at MSRI and an assistant professor at Brown. He also taught at UC Santa Cruz. Since then he has taught math at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York City. His main research interests are automorphic forms and Diophantine geometry.

Speaker Bio: Noel is an unusually Swift, Principled Engineer with ostensibly inscrutable hair trying to get people to talk to their computers in an increasingly less scrutable world.