Books by "George David Birkhoff"
3 books found
A successful mathematical career involves doing good mathematics, to be sure, but also requires a wide range of skills that are not normally taught in graduate school. The purpose of this book is to provide guidance to the professional mathematician in how to develop and survive in the profession. There is information on how to begin a research program, how to apply for a grant, how to get tenure, how to teach, and how to get along with one's colleagues. After tenure, there is information on how to direct a Ph.D. student, how to serve on committees, and how to serve in various posts in the math department. There is extensive information on how to serve as Chairman. There is also material on trouble areas: sexual harassment, legal matters, disputes with colleagues, dealing with the dean, and so forth.One of the themes of the book is how to have a fulfilling professional life. In order to achieve this goal, Krantz discusses keeping a vigorous scholarly program going and finding new challenges, as well as dealing with the everyday tasks of research, teaching, and administration. In short, this is a survival manual for the professional mathematician - both in academics and in industry and government agencies. It is a sequel to the author's ""A Mathematician's Survival Guide"".
“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same. Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars. Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time. How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.