I Want to Be a Mathematician: An Automathography in Three Parts (Maa Spectrum Series) by Paul R. Halmos (PDF)

Description

I Want To Be A Mathematician is an account of the author’s life as a mathematician. It tells us what it is like to be a mathematician and to do mathematics. It will be read with interest and enjoyment by those in mathematics and by those who might want to know what mathematicians and mathematical careers are like. Paul Halmos is well-known for his research in ergodic theory, and measure theory. He is one of the most widely read mathematical expositors in the world.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review Halmos… an outstanding research mathematician, and a great expositor whose writing is not only clear, but a delight to read. –Melvin Henricksen, Historia MathematicaA frank, personal, witty commentary on mathematicians and mathematics by one of the most influential mathematicians of our time –Henry Helson, Mathematical ReviewsA truly unique book, which nobody but Paul Halmos could have written. I think it will be a classic. –Constance Reid About the Author Paul Halmos received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. at the University of Illinois, writing his dissertation under the direction of J. L. Doob. After a period at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, where he was assistant to John von Neumann (1940-42), he returned briefly to Illinois. Since then he has held faculty positions at the following universities: Illinois, Syracuse, Chicago, Michigan (Ann Arbor), Hawaii, California (Santa Barbara), Indiana, and Santa Clara, where he became professor emeritus in 1995. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Tulane, Montevideo, Miami (Florida), California (Berkeley), Washington (Seattle), Edinburgh, Chiao Tung (Taiwan), and Western Australia, as well as several visits to the IAS. He has written over 100 research papers and many reviews in his principal research fields of operator theory, algebraic logic, and ergodic theory, with additional work in topological groups, probability, statistics, and Boolean algebras. Honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and honorary doctorates from St. Andrews, DePauw, Waterloo, and Kalamazoo. Widely known as an editor, in addition to his years of editing the American Mathematical Monthly, Paul Halmos has held similar positions with Mathematical Reviews, the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, the Journal fur die Reine und Angewandte Mathematik (Crelle’s Journal), Mathematical Spectrum, the Indiana Journal of Mathematics, as well as the Ergebniße der Mathematik, the Undergraduate Texts series, the Graduate Texts series and the Problem Books series for Springer-Verlag.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Halmos was an excellent expositor of mathematics, and this book is an excellent exposition about being a mathematician. At the end, Paul Halmos admits that he still wants to be a mathematician after decades of having been one; one interpretation of this is that one cannot ever stop trying to grow mathematically if one wants to call oneself a mathematician. As a mathematician myself (albeit at a much lower level than Halmos), this seems to me to be about right. Halmos’ life as a mathematician is fascinating. From his student days when he toyed with being a philosopher through his career as a top-level researcher to his later years when he concentrated more on being an editor, it is hard to put the book down. There is very little in here about Halmos’ personal life, which he makes clear in his introduction. For example, he had two wives, but he rarely mentions either of them, and it comes as a surprise when he casually mentions his wife with regard to one of several long trips that he made in his working life. For me, the obvious comparison is to Hardy’s “A Mathematician’s Apology”, which I found patronizing and unreadable. (Hardy suggests that if you are not outstanding at something, you should not do it- although perhaps not intentional, this is a bit insulting to those mathematicians who are less accomplished than he is.) Halmos’ can be nasty and arrogant, but his humor makes up for that to a large extent. An example of his arrogance is when he says that training new PhD’s is something every mathematician has to do; which is clearly false, at least in the USA. He later mitigates this by pointing out that there are mathematics departments at (undergraduate) liberal arts schools with a better approach to being mathematicians than some of the research institutions, thereby implicitly acknowledging that being a mathematician does not necessarily imply training PhD’s directly. I highly recommend this book to anyone thinking about being a mathematician, as well as to those who already are.

⭐I don’t think my words of praise would do justice to this wonderful book. Halmos has strong opinions almost about everything and the way he talks about his examples are very wise. You don’t need to be a would-be mathematician to enjoy the book. If you have ever wondered or invested some time in the world of mathematics, science and academia, Halmos provides you a very good account. If you are more than interested in math or maybe thinking about pursuing a Ph.D. this book will be much more valuable for you.There are so many parts to be quoted from the book but I prefer to start a Wikiquote page for Halmos and pour sentences there. Halmos may not be one of the greats (according to his words) such as Euler, Gauss, Riemann, etc. but he is probably the greatest writer of such books.All along the book I had a feeling: it was more like a frank and witty dialogue between me and the great mathematician (and lecturer) who had been there and done that. I kept on asking questions and Halmos kept on giving answers.Thank you Mr. Halmos, for having wanted to be a mathematician, having been one of the best and having written such a nice book on what it was all about.

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