Ian Stewart (matemático)

Ian Stewart
Nascimento	24 de setembro de 1945 (73 anos) Inglaterra
Nacionalidade	Inglês
Alma mater	Churchill College (Cambridge), Universidade de Warwick
Prêmios	Prêmio Michael Faraday (1995), Medalha Christopher Zeeman (2008)
Orientador(es)	Brian Hartley
Instituições	Universidade de Warwick
Campo(s)	Matemática
Tese	1969: Subideals of Lie Algebras

Ian Nicholas Stewart FRS (24 de setembro de 1945) é um matemático inglês.

É professor de matemática na Universidade de Warwick, Inglaterra, e um conhecido escritor de ciência popular e ficção científica. Em 2008 foi o primeiro a receber a Medalha Christopher Zeeman.

Biografia

Stewart nasceu na Inglaterra, em 1945. Quando frequentava a sixth form, Stewart despertou a atenção de seu professor de matemática. Durante este período de estudos o professor passou exames do nível mais avançado Advanced Level sem preparação prévia dos estudantes, tendo Stewart ficado em primeiro lugar. Este professor engajou-se então na obtenção de uma bolsa de estudos para que Stewart fosse estudar no Churchill College (Cambridge). Lá formou-se em matemática, obtendo o doutorado em 1969 na Universidade de Warwick, onde obteve em seguida um posto acadêmico. É atualmente professor de matemática da Universidade de Warwick.

Publicações

Matemática e ciência popular

• Another Fine Math You've Got Me Into
• Concepts of Modern Mathematics
• Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos
• Game, Set and Math
• Fearful Symmetry
• Figments of Reality, with Jack Cohen
• Flatterland, ISBN 0-7382-0442-0, Perseus Books Group, April 2001. (See Flatland)
• From Here to Infinity, first published as The Problems of Mathematics
• Life's Other Secret
• Math Hysteria, ISBN 0-19-861336-9, Oxford University Press, June 2004
• Nature's Numbers
• The Collapse of Chaos, with Jack Cohen
• The Magical Maze (1998) ISBN 0-471-35065-6
• The Problems of Mathematics
• What is Mathematics? – originally by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, second edition revised by Ian Stewart
• Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, with Jack Cohen. Second edition published as What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life
• Letters to a Young Mathematician, ISBN 0-465-08231-9, Basic Books, May 2006
• How to Cut a Cake: And Other Mathematical Conundrums (2006) ISBN 978-0-19-920590-5
• Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry (2007) ISBN 0-465-08236-X
• Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities (2008) ISBN 1-84668-064-6
• Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures (2009) ISBN 978-1-84668-292-6
• Cows in the Maze: And Other Mathematical Explorations (2010) ISBN 978-0-19-956207-7
• Taming the infinite: The story of Mathematics from the first numbers to chaos theory (2008) ISBN 978-1-84724-788-1
• The Mathematics of Life (2011) ISBN 978-0-465-02238-0
• 17 Equations that Changed the World (2012) ISBN 978-1-84668-531-6

Série Science of Discworld

• The Science of Discworld, with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
• The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
• The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett

Livros texto

• Catastrophe Theory and its Applications, with Tim Poston, Pitman, 1978. ISBN 0-273-01029-8.
• Complex Analysis: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Plane, I. Stewart, D Tall. 1983 ISBN 0-521-24513-3
• Algebraic number theory and Fermat's last theorem, 3rd Edition, I. Stewart, D Tall. A. K. Peters (2002) ISBN 1-56881-119-5
• Galois Theory, 3rd Edition, Chapman and Hall (2000) ISBN 1-58488-393-6 Galois Theory Errata

Ficção científica

• Wheelers, with Jack Cohen (fiction)
• Heaven, with Jack Cohen, ISBN 0-446-52983-4, Aspect, May 2004 (fiction)

Outros

• PMID 17653179 (PubMed)
  
• PMID 16778864 (PubMed)
  
• PMID 15662394 (PubMed)
  
• PMID 15306790 (PubMed)
  
• PMID 14961110 (PubMed)
  
• PMID 12931173 (PubMed)
  
• PMID 12736663 (PubMed)
  
• PMID 12686981 (PubMed)
  

Citações selecionadas

• From What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life:

"Science is the best defense against believing what we want to."

• From Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications:

"We may predict that ... as methods relevant to organized complexity develop in laboratory science, the social sciences will benefit in proportion. The new concepts — fusing with, changing, and adding to present understanding — may allow the definition and measurement of quantities more central to the health of the body politick than a 'standard of living' that includes useless packaging discarded, or a 'gross national product' that includes machines whose productivity is measured in megadeaths. ... If any mathematical methods can aid in the growth of such wisdom, then catastrophe theory will be part of them."

• From Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos on the concept of fungibility and how it applies to science:

"Lawyers have a concept known as 'fungibility'. Things are fungible if substituting one for another has no legal implications. For example, cans of baked beans with the same manufacturer and the same nominal weight are fungible: you have no legal complaint if the shop substitutes a different can when the assistant notices that the one you've just bought is dented. The fact that the new can contains 1,346 beans, whereas the old one contained 1,347, is legally irrelevant.

That's what `take as given' means, too. Explanations that climb the reductionist hierarchy are cascades of fungibilities. Such explanations are comprehensible, and thus convincing, only because each stage in the story relies only upon particular simple features of the previous stage. The complicated details a level or two down do not need to be carried upwards indefinitely. Such features are intellectual resting-points in the chain of logic. Examples include the observation that atoms can be assembled into many complex structures, making molecules possible, and the complicated but elegant geometry of the DNA double helix that permits the `encoding' of complex `instructions' for making organisms. The story can then continue with the computational abilities of DNA coding, onward and upward to goats, without getting enmeshed in the quantum wave functions of amino acids.

What we tend to forget, when told a story with this structure, is that it could have had many different beginnings. Anything that lets us start from the molecular level would have done just as well. A totally different subatomic theory would be an equally valid starting-point for the story, provided it led to the same general feature of a replicable molecule. Subatomic particle theory is fungible when viewed from the level of goats. It has to be, or else we would never be able to keep a goat without first doing a Ph.D. in subatomic physics."

Ligações externas

• Professor Ian Stewart, FRS
• Ian Stewart (em inglês) no Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Michael Faraday prize winners 2004–1986
• Directory of Fellows of the Royal Society: Ian Stewart
• Prof Ian Stewart at Debrett's People of Today
• What does a Martian look like? Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart set out to find the answers
• Ian Stewart on space exploration by NASA
• Ian Stewart on Minesweeper one of the Millennium mathematics problems
• Press release about Terry Pratchett "Wizard Making" of Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart at the University of Warwick
• Interview with Ian Stewart on the Science of Discworld series
• Audio Interview with Ian Stewart on April 25, 2007 from WINA's Charlottesville Right Now
• Podcast series with Ian Stewart on the history of symmetry
• A Partly True Story in: Scientific American, Feb 1993