Keith Devlin

Keith J. Devlin (Hull, Great Britain, 16 March, 1947) is an English mathematician and popular science writer.

Biography

Devlin is co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University's Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR), a co-founder of Stanford Media X university-industry research partnership program, a Senior Researcher in the Center for the Study of Language and Information, and a Consulting Professor of mathematics at Stanford. He is a commentator on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday, where he is known as "The Math Guy."^[1]

As of 2008, he is the author of 28 books. Several of his books are aimed at an audience of the general public, as opposed to much academic work.

Devlin is also creator of the concept "soft mathematics", introduced in the final chapter of his book "Goodbye, Descartes".

The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern. Basic Books. 2008. ISBN 978-0465009107.
The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics. Plume. 2007. ISBN 0452288576. with coauthor Gary Lorden
The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs). Thunder's Mouth Press. 2006. ISBN 156025839X.
The Millennium Problems: the Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time. Basic Books. 2002. ISBN 0465017304.
The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip. Basic Books. 2000. ISBN 0465016197.
Mathematics: The New Golden Age. Columbia University Press. 1999. ISBN 023111639X.
The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible. Holt Paperbacks. 1998. ISBN 0805072543.
Mathematics: The Science of Patterns. Holt Paperbacks. 1996. ISBN 0805073442.
The Joy of Sets: Fundamentals of Contemporary Set Theory. Springer. 1993. ISBN 0387940944.
Logic and Information. Cambridge University Press. 1991. ISBN 0521499712.
Constructibility. Springer. 1984. ISBN 3540132589.

Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award^[2]
2007 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization^[3]
2004 International Pythagoras Prize in Mathematics, in the category Best Expository Text in the Mathematical Sciences for the Italian translation of The Millennium Problems.^[4]