Amir Dan Aczel (; ; November 6, 1950 – November 26, 2015) was an Israeli-born American lecturer in mathematics and the

history of mathematics The history of mathematics deals with the origin of discoveries in mathematics and the History of mathematical notation, mathematical methods and notation of the past. Before the modern age and the worldwide spread of knowledge, written examples ...

and

science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

, and an author of

popular science Popular science (also called pop-science or popsci) is an interpretation of science intended for a general audience. While science journalism focuses on recent scientific developments, popular science is more broad ranging. It may be written ...

Biography

Amir D. Aczel was born in

Haifa, Israel Haifa ( ; , ; ) is the third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropolitan area in Israel. It is home to t ...

. Aczel's father was the captain of a passenger ship that sailed primarily in the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Eur ...

. When he was ten, Aczel's father taught him how to steer a ship and

navigate Navigation is a field of study that focuses on the process of monitoring and controlling the movement of a craft or vehicle from one place to another.Bowditch, 2003:799. The field of navigation includes four general categories: land navigation, ...

. This inspired Aczel's book ''The Riddle of the Compass''. Amir graduated from the

Hebrew Reali School The Hebrew Reali School of Haifa (), located in Haifa, Israel, is one of the country's oldest private schools.University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. He graduated with a BA in mathematics in 1975 and received a Master of Science in 1976. Several years later Aczel earned a PhD in

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

from the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a Public university, public research university in Eugene, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1876, the university is organized into nine colleges and schools and offers 420 undergraduate and gra ...

. Aczel taught mathematics at universities in California,

Alaska Alaska ( ) is a non-contiguous U.S. state on the northwest extremity of North America. Part of the Western United States region, it is one of the two non-contiguous U.S. states, alongside Hawaii. Alaska is also considered to be the north ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

and

Greece Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Located on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to th ...

. He married his wife Debra in 1984 and had one daughter, Miriam, and one stepdaughter. He accepted a professorship at

Bentley College Bentley University is a private university in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded in 1917 as a school of accounting and finance in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. Bentley has one undergraduate school which offers 17 business ma ...

, where he taught classes on statistics and the

history of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient history, ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural science, natural, social science, social, and formal science, formal. Pr ...

and

. He authored two textbooks on statistics. While teaching at Bentley, Aczel wrote several non-technical books on mathematics and science, as well as two textbooks. His book ''Fermat's Last Theorem'' was a United States bestseller and was nominated for a

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Since 1980, the ''Los Angeles Times'' has awarded a set of annual book prizes. The ''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize currently has nine categories: biography, current interest, fiction, first fiction (the Art Seidenbaum Award added in 1991), his ...

. Aczel appeared on

CNN Cable News Network (CNN) is a multinational news organization operating, most notably, a website and a TV channel headquartered in Atlanta. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable ne ...

CNBC CNBC is an American List of business news channels, business news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of Comcast's NBCUniversal. The network broadcasts live business news and analysis programming during the morning, Day ...

The History Channel History (formerly and commonly known as the History Channel) is an American pay television network and the flagship channel of A&E Networks, a joint venture between Hearst Communications and the General Entertainment Content division of The Wa ...

and

Nightline ''Nightline'' (or ''ABC News Nightline'') is ABC News (United States), ABC News' Late night television in the United States, late-night television news program broadcast on American Broadcasting Company, ABC in the United States with a franchis ...

. Aczel was a 2004 Fellow of the

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation is a private foundation formed in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Gr ...

, a visiting scholar in the History of Science at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

(2007), and was awarded a Sloan Foundation grant to research his book ''Finding Zero'' (2015). In 2003, he became a research fellow at the

Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science is an interdepartmental, interuniversity forum on the nature of science, and each year organizes the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science. History The Center for Philosophy and ...

, and in Fall 2011 was teaching mathematics courses at

University of Massachusetts Boston The University of Massachusetts Boston (stylized as UMass Boston) is a Public university, public US-based research university. It is the only public research university in Boston and the third-largest campus in the five-campus University of Ma ...

. He was a speaker at La Ciudad de las Ideas in, Puebla, Mexico, in 2008 and 2011. He died in Nîmes, France in 2015 from cancer.

Works

*''Complete Business

Statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

, 8th Edition, 2012.'' *''Statistics: Concepts and Applications, 1995''. *''How to Beat the I.R.S. at Its Own Game: Strategies to Avoid and Fight an Audit'', 1996. * ''Fermat's Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem'', 1997. * ''God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe'', 1999. * ''The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity'', 2000. * ''Probability 1: The Book That Proves There Is Life in Outer Space'',

Harvest Books Harcourt () was an American publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. It was known at different stages in its history as Harcourt Brace, & Co. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. From 1919 to 1 ...

, January 2000. . * ''The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World'', 2001. * ''Entanglement: The Greatest Mystery in Physics'', 2002. and * ''Pendulum: Léon Foucault and the Triumph of Science'', 2003. * ''Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, and the Stock Market'', 2004. * ''Descartes' Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe'', 2005. * ''The Artist and the Mathematician: The Story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the Genius Mathematician Who Never Existed'', 2007.

High Stakes Publishing High may refer to: Science and technology * Height * High (atmospheric), a high-pressure area * High (computability), a quality of a Turing degree, in computability theory * High (tectonics), in geology an area where relative tectonic uplift to ...

, London. . * ''The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man'', 2007. * ''Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age'', 2009. * ''The Cave and the Cathedral: How a Real-Life Indiana Jones and a Renegade Scholar Decoded the Ancient Art of Man'', 2009. * ''Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider'', 2010. * ''A Strange Wilderness: The Lives of the Great Mathematicians'', 2011. * ''Why Science Does Not Disprove God'', 2014. * ''Finding Zero'', 2015. *

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Aczel, Amir 1950 births 2015 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Hebrew Reali School alumni Bentley University faculty Boston University faculty Deaths from cancer in France Harvard University staff American historians of mathematics Israeli emigrants to the United States Jewish Israeli writers Writers from Haifa UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni University of Massachusetts Boston faculty University of Oregon alumni American science communicators Israeli science communicators