You have a homework essay due Monday, May 3rd. Here is the description: Hand in (online, in the student drop box) a full page essay about something you find interesting about a historical mathematician; this should not be a biography, so be specific about the 'something' you find interesting.

In addition, you will be asked to give a short summary of your research IN CLASS. That will not be on the actual due date - most likely over a period of a few weeks at the end of class people will do them.

The idea is that you maybe do an hour of research in the library or by looking online, and then it would maybe take another hour to type or write your page. I will be giving class off on Friday, April 30th, to help you with this. Remember, it is to be handed in online, and separately from anything else due that week. If you are using a Mac, be sure to save your document in the .rtf format so that I can read it!

Who on earth would you write about? Here is a very short list of some mathematicians and/or mathematically minded people whom you could write about; it is not complete, so don't get a math friend to complain about it: Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, the Bernoullis, Euler, Fibonacci, Pascal, Fermat, Mersenne, Gauss, Abel, Galois, Dirichlet, Weierstrass, Fourier, Condorcet, Borda, Cauchy, Cantor, Hilbert, Ramanujan, Hardy, Laplace, Galileo, Newton, MacLane, Dickson, Jacobson, Einstein, Noether, Grothendieck, Gromov, Wiles...

How should you go about this? Remember, no big deal - find something interesting to you and write about it. Go to the library in Eckhart and look for history of math books. Or try the World Wide Web. If you don't think you'll find anything interesting, email me!

As for the books, they are mostly under QA 21-31; the more biographical books seem to be in QA 28-29 particularly. E.T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics", despite its dated (though accurate) title, is the first resource which exposed many people to the wacky world of real humans doing mathematics; unfortunately, much of the information is sensationalized. Books by the late Dirk Struik are more reliable. On the other hand, you might want to check out a more popularized book about just one person; Constance Reid's books about Hilbert and Courant should be easy to find. Then there are the recent books about Paul Erdos ("The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", "My Brain is Open"), Srinivasa Ramanujan ("The Man Who Knew Infinity") and John Nash ("A Beautiful Mind"); for the latter PLEASE have read about him, not just watched the film, because it is relatively inaccurate and omits much of the scandalous air surrounding him. Though my wife thought Russell Crowe looked pretty hot teaching that class.

As mentioned above, you could use the Web - though be warned, Google's not as useful for this as you might think. Here is a phenomenal page: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive. Other places you could look online would be at any major university, and try www.math.yourfavorite.edu and browse around for history links. There have been many famous mathematicians right here at U of C, but I don't want to get in trouble by choosing only a few ;) But you could ask around.

To help you get some ideas, here is a table with common names encountered under certain rubrics. Some of you might be interested in one of the following categories. I can't possibly be exhaustive, so please email me (before Friday) if you are interested in some kind of category you don't see. Remember, the point is for YOU to be and get interested! I have my own favorites; you will, too.