Ian Stewart (Mathematician)

Books

• Another Fine Math You've Got Me Into
• Concepts of Modern Mathematics
• Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos
• Game, Set and Math
• Fearful Symmetry
• Figments of Reality, with Jack Cohen
• Flatterland, ISBN 0738204420, Perseus Books Group, April 2001. (See Flatland)
• From Here to Infinity, first published as The Problems of Mathematics
• Life's Other Secret
• Math Hysteria, ISBN 0198613369, Oxford University Press, June 2004
• Nature's Numbers
• The Collapse of Chaos, with Jack Cohen
• The Magical Maze
• The Problems of Mathematics
• The Science of Discworld, with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
• , with Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett
• What is Mathematics? – originally by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, second edition by Ian Stewart
• Wheelers, with Jack Cohen (fiction)
• Heaven, with Jack Cohen, ISBN 0446529834, Aspect, May 2004
• , with Jack Cohen. Second edition published as What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life

Select quotations

• From What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life

"Science is the best defence against believing what we want to."

• From Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos on the concept of fungibility and how it applies to science:

"Lawyers have a concept known as 'Fungibility'. Things are fungible if substituting one for another has no legal implications. For example, cans of baked beans with the same manufacturer and the same nominal weight are fungible: you have no legal complaint if the shop substitutes a different can when the assistant notices that the one you've just bought is dented. The fact that the new can contains 1,346 beans, whereas the old one contained 1,347, is legally irrelevant.

That's what `take as given' means, too. Explanations that climb the reductionist hierarchy are cascades of fungibilities. Such explanations are comprehensible, and thus convincing, only because each stage in the story relies only upon particular simple features of the previous stage. The complicated details a level or two down do not need to be carried upwards indefinitely. Such features are intellectual resting-points in the chain of logic. Examples include the observation that atoms can be assembled into many complex structures, making molecules possible, and the complicated but elegant geometry of the DNA double helix that permits the `encoding' of complex `instructions' for making organisms. The story can then continue with the computational abilities of DNA coding, onward and upward to goats, without getting enmeshed in the quantum wave functions of amino acids.

What we tend to forget, when told a story with this structure, is that it could have had many different beginnings. Anything that lets us start from the molecular level would have done just as well. A totally different subatomic theory would be an equally valid starting-point for the story, provided it led to the same general feature of a replicable molecule. Subatomic particle theory is fungible when viewed from the level of goats. It has to be, or else we would never be able to keep a goat without first doing a Ph.D. in subatomic physics."

External links

• Ian Stewart's personal homepage

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