Frank Morgan

When I visited Universiti Teknologi Mara in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I was most impressed by the young mathematician who presided at my session, Nuru’l-‘izzah Othman. She summarized the session as follows, better than I could have:

Three golden rules for starting a mathematics project:

1.  Start small. Try to start with small and manageable projects and avoid being too ambitious.

2.  Start with something familiar or close to one’s heart.

3.  Do what you enjoy doing and enjoy what you are doing. Continue reading ‘World Peace through Mathematics’ »

At the Math, Science, Technology Conference at Exeter in June, I met high school mathematics teacher Patricia Heather-Lea. She shared with me and now with you a message she once drafted but never sent to her students:

“Dear students, I know that you can reach anyone, anytime, anywhere, using technology. I want you to know that you must not lose sight of the here and now, to be able to look into someone’s eyes, and say:

I am sorry;

I love you;

Forgive me.

This ability is critical to the present and the future of the human race.

Love, Mrs. Heather-Lea”

Jianguo Cao, who passed on in June, was a good mathematician and correspondent. It was his paper with Itai Benjamini on the isoperimetric problem in surfaces of revolution that first proved, for example, that isoperimetric curves in the paraboloid {z=x²+y²} are horizontal circles. Many papers followed by many mathematicians, including me.

After writing a joint paper with Hugh Howards and Michael Hutchings and returning from leave, in cleaning out old files I discovered a preprint of Cao’s paper with Benjamini which Cao gave me at the Lehigh Geometry/Topology Conference in June, 1994. I forgot all about it and got interested in the problem two years later. The basic idea of our Theorem 2.1 came from Hutchings in an email message of December 19, 1996. But now I know that the first inspiration came from Cao.