Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart was born in Folkestone in 1945. He graduated in Mathematics from Cambridge and obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick, where he is now Professor of Mathematics. He has also held visiting positions in Germany, New Zealand, Connecticut and Texas. He is an active research mathematician with over a hundred published papers, and he takes a particular interest in problems that lie in the gaps between pure and applied mathematics.

Ian Stewart has written or co-authored over sixty books, including Nature's Numbers, shortlisted for the 1996 Rhone-Poulenc Prize for Science Books; The Collapse of Chaos; Fearful Symmetry; From Here to Infinity; Game, Set and Math; Another Fine Math You've Got Me Into; The Problems of Mathematics; the bestselling Does God Play Dice?; Nature's Numbers; From Here to Infinity; Figments of Reality; and Life's Other Secret (several of which are published in Penguin); and three mathematical comic books published in French. He has written for a wide range of newspapers and magazines in the UK, Europe and the USA, including Nature, Focus, Discover and The Sciences. He is mathematics consultant for New Scientist and writes the 'Mathematical Recreations' column in Scientific American. He also writes science fiction stories and has made numerous radio and television appearances. In 1995 the Royal Society awarded him the Michael Faraday Medal for the year's most significant contribution to the public understanding of science, and he has been selected for the 1997 Communicator Award of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics in the USA.