Foreword
How do the words of mathematicians, discussing their work, their careers, their lives, become known to a larger audience? There are, of course, biographies and autobiographies of mathematicians going as far back as Pythagoras. There are letters galore. Some off-the-cuff remarks have been preserved (e.g., those of Lagrange). Thus, authentic words of bygone mathematicians are not difficult to come by, and out of them it would be easy to construct an imaginative mock interview:
Interviewer: Academician Euler, with so many children how did you manage to separate your professional life from your family life?
Euler: I’m glad you asked. I didn’t. I consider all of them, theorems and children, as my results.
Interviews? The word interview originally meant simply the meeting of two people. Later it came to mean the questioning of some notable person by a newspaper reporter. In the current and wider sense of the word, interviews with mathematicians start, say, around 1950. We now have interviews that link mathematical works, lives, and opinions. They are often called oral histories.
Since 1950 modes of communication and the possibility of social/technological interchanges have grown exponentially (a mathematical term that pundits like to use). Newspapers, books (e.g., the recent Recountings: Conversations with MIT Mathematicians), radio, TV, dramatic stage productions, movies, e-mail, YouTube, the Internet, and conference reports all record or depict interviews in which mathematicians often sound off on all sorts of topics far removed from their narrow specialties. I myself have interviewed several dozen numerical analysts, with texts now available online, as a part of a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) project. Thus, the time of much singing has come, and the voice of the mathematician is heard in the land. The question of who is listening is not beyond conjecture.
The variety of subjects, professional values, personal lifestyles, and more, of contemporary mathematicians are all well depicted in the interviews presented in this third collection of Mathematical People. Those of us in the mathematical business will find the macro aspect familiar, while the micro aspect satisfies our natural curiosity as to why and what the next fellow is up to.
Perhaps, therefore, the larger value of such collections as this may be found in, say, twenty-five or fifty years. During this interval of time, the very nature of mathematics, its contents, its applications, the manner of its presentation, and of its support by society may have changed substantially. The study of the history of mathematics confirms such a view. A future mathematician may pick up this book in a library or in whatever format texts are then the norm and say, “Gosh, that was certainly the golden age,” or alternatively, and with considerable pride, “How much better, from all points of view, things are now!”