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Mathematics Professor Adrian Rice |
R-MC
Mathematics Professor Adrian Rice received the Trevor Evans Award from the Mathematical Association of America at their annual MathFest summer meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Trevor Evans Awards, established by the Board of Governors in 1992 and first awarded in 1996, are made to authors of expository articles that are accessible to undergraduates and are published in Math Horizons. The Awards are named for Trevor Evans, a distinguished mathematician, teacher, and writer at Emory University.
Rice was recognized for his article titled
Gaussian Guesswork (or Why 1.19814023473559220744... is Such a Beautiful Number). At the awards ceremony, Rice was lauded for the article: “In this delightful exposition, Adrian Rice draws on stories from the life of Carl Friedrich Gauss to demonstrate the experimentation, observation, invention, and imagination that nurture the living and growing subject of mathematics. The article discusses entries in Gauss’ mathematical diary. He began with numerical experimentation, which led to proving an amazing relationship between a sophisticated form of average, a particular value of an elliptic integral and the well-known ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Readers will walk through critical stages of Gauss’ intellectual journey and see how one of the giants of mathematics, on whose shoulders we often stand today, used intuition as part of his approach to discovering new mathematics.”
Rice, who joined the faculty at R-MC in 1999, earned his B.S. in mathematics from University College London and his Ph.D. in the history of mathematics from Middlesex University. His research at R-MC focuses on 19th-century and early 20th-century mathematics. His publications include
Mathematics Unbound: The Evolution of an International Mathematical Research Community, 1800–1945 (edited with Karen Hunger Parshall) and
The London Mathematical Society Book of Presidents, 1865–1965 (written with Susan Oakes and Alan Pears.) He recently co-edited a book on mathematics in Victorian Britain.