3M
When Dirk Jan Struik, the much celebrated Dutch-American differential geometer and historian of mathematics and science, celebrated his 100th birthday in 1994 (he died in 2000), a student reporter at MIT asked him,"How did you manage to write peer-reviewed articles when you're in your nineties?"
To which Dr. Struik replied,
"I live with three M's: marriage, mathematics and Marxism."
A foremost Marxian theoretician as well, Professor Struik is one of the few pure mathematician who were prosecuted during the McCarthyite era. A full professor at MIT, he was also a part-time organizer in the Boston workman's club and its affiliated labor union evening school. His representative works include Lectures on Classical Differential Geometry and Birth of the Communist Manifesto.
I am looking very hard for his A Concise History of Mathematics, and was not able to locate a copy of it (which is strange: for it is a bestseller).
posted by James Chang @ 4:10 PM
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