ROGER L. COOKE, Ph.D.,
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS
Retired as of
Email: cooke@cems.uvm.edu
Areas of expertise: history of mathematics, Fourier analysis
Applications: Both areas help people understand the world.
This picture of me was taken in December of
2005.
MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE (June 2009)
My Education
and Employment: After
graduating from Northwestern University in 1963 with a mathematics major, I attended Princeton
What I've
Produced: My research
was originally in multiple trigonometric series. The best thing I did in that
area was to prove a Cantor–Lebesgue theorem in two variables, back in
1970. It turned out to be a simple thing
to do, but no one had expected it to be easy, so I was lucky enough to get in
ahead of the others. After 1975 my
motivation to do pure mathematical research waned and I began to be interested
in the history of mathematics. In 1981 I took a sabbatical year to start
working in this area. My first effort was The Mathematics of Sonya Kovalevskaya (Springer-Verlag,
1984). Over the years I have written a number of articles about her
mathematical work. I think my best work
in this area was a history of the Cauchy–Kovalevskaya theorem,
which I presented at a conference in
I spent part of a sabbatical year (1988–89)
in Moscow studying the works of N.N. Luzin. One result
of this work was a study of the relation between uniqueness of trigonometric
series representations and descriptive set theory from 1870 to 1985, which
appeared in Archive
for History of Exact Sciences in 1994.
My major effort in the history of mathematics
is a textbook intended for a first undergraduate course (1997). The second, thoroughly
revised edition, whose cover you see below, is now available from Wiley. The cover design came from a quilt bearing
the name "A Number Called Phi" that I saw at a show in Northfield,
Vermont back in 2003. The quilt's
creator, Mary Knapp of Watertown, New York, combines her interest in quilting
with many other things, including mathematics.
During my years at the University of Vermont
I directed the doctoral dissertations of three students. The most recent was Gerard LaVarnway, a 
professor at 
Norwich
University in
In my retirement I hope to work on the kinds
of hopelessly difficult problems that young mathematicians dream of solving,
such as the Riemann hypothesis. I'd also
like to continue my work in the history of mathematics and science by learning
the history of superstring theory. I got
distracted from these projects during 2007 by another writing project that I
couldn’t resist, a book that I call Classical
Algebra: Its Nature, Origins, and Uses.
It has now been published, and I’ve looked at it enough to find three
misprints and one small error. So, I
guess I’d better put up a web page of
corrections. As long as I’m on the
subject, I’ll just boast a bit and mention that this book has won a CHOICE on-line readers award as one of nine outstanding academic books
in mathematics for 2008.
Now that I have gotten it out of my system, I
am determined not to allow any further distractions. I am now working on the story of superstring
theory. Since I have much to learn before
I can competently write about any of this material, I expect it will be several
years before I publish again. But please
stay tuned in to this website. I may
find something interesting and decide to blog about it. The main restriction I am imposing on myself
is to do no more encyclopedia articles, book reviews, lectures, and the like,
except for my local community. I’m happy
to visit classrooms and talk to students and those in the public who have an
interest in the things I know a bit about, but I’ve really had all the
publishing I care to do for a while.
Sidelines: In addition
to teaching and research, I have contributed, I hope, to the advancement of
knowledge through several ancillary projects, some of which are the following.
Translations. I began translating Russian
mathematical articles for the American Mathematical Society in the 1970's. The AMS translations project
was taken over in the 1990s by the London Mathematical Society, for whom I translated a few articles from
the Soviet journal Математический Сборник (Matematicheskii Sbornik).
I did a great deal of translation (I estimate some 10,000 pages) of
Russian and Ukrainian articles and books during the years 1986–1998, when my
three children were in college. The
next-to-last project I undertook in this area was a translation of the fourth
(2002) edition of the two-volume Математический Анализ (Matematicheskii
Analiz), by Vladimir Zorich, for
Springer-Verlag. This work is the best
rigorous, yet thoroughly applied work on real analysis for undergraduates that
I have seen. I am very proud to have
been the translator of these excellent textbooks. The very last project was to translate 20 of
24 essays on various aspects of twentieth-century mathematics with emphasis on
Soviet contributions, a collection bearing the title Математические События ХХ Века (Mathematical
Events of the Twentieth Century),
which has recently been published by PHASIS/Springer-Verlag. That's absolutely it as far as I'm concerned. No more translating.
Fun Problems. As a
puzzle enthusiast, I like to take the challenge of each year's Putnam
Examination, administered by the Mathematical Association of America. If you'd
like to compare your answers with mine, click here to see my solutions to the 2008 Putnam Examination,
given December 6.
Under this heading, I plan to add, from time
to time, essays on mathematical topics that interest me. Here’s the first, a proof of the Steiner–Lehmus Theorem that I
thought of some 25 years ago, then forgot about until reminded by my friend
Tony Trono, who learned of my proof from a former student of mine. While writing it up for posting here, I
thought of an analytic proof and included it.
(Added
Useful Problems. I am also happy to serve as a consultant to
the public and to my colleagues at the University, as these free consultations
often lead to interesting problems to be solved. Here are some
samples of my work. May I politely ask,
however, that you not send me your angle trisections, circle quadratures, and
the like. I have examined many dozens of
these over the years (one sample is posted here), and I feel I have earned my
retirement from this type of work.
Free Stuff!! Over the years, I have written several
textbooks in my own quirky style.
Because they are so idiosyncratic, they wouldn’t have much commercial
value, and I have not tried to publish them.
I offer them for free here. They
were written using standard Latex and converted to portable document format for
posting. You can download these pdfs and
use them any way you like. If you’d like
to modify them, write to me, and I’ll send you the original TeX files from
which they were produced. I’m putting up
two of them here, with a third (on vector analysis) to follow soon. (I am
currently proofreading and indexing it.)
So, here they are. The first is a
practical-math textbook for social science and environmental studies students,
which I call Empirical Mathematics. I
have actually used it in the classroom once.
It wasn’t a great success, but the audience was, after all, reluctant to
be in any mathematics course. The second
is a course in real and functional analysis intended mostly as background for
understanding the use of linear operators in quantum mechanics. I call it Classical Analysis. I
have never used it in the classroom, but you may find it a useful source of
problems. Be warned that my definition
of the Riemann–Stieltjes integral is not equivalent to the standard one that you
will find in “baby Rudin.” I have what I
believe are cogent reasons for preferring mine.
Have all the fun you like with these
books. Just don’t write to complain
about any mistakes or other infelicities you find. You got it for free, and it’s worth every
cent you paid for it.
The History of Mathematics at UVM. Around 1990, in connection with the UVM
bicentennial, I wrote a history of mathematics at UVM. I have recently looked at it again and added
a few endnotes to update it. I’m putting
it here in several forms, so that you can have your choice of format: (1) single-file web page/web
archive (.mhtml); (2) Word
1997–2003 (.doc); (3) Adobe
Acrobat (.pdf). I also have a
Microsoft Word version (.docx) that I’ll be happy to send to anyone. I don’t include it here, since the .docx
format doesn’t download very well.
Microsoft Internet Explorer regards the file as a zipped file and
handles it accordingly. Finally, I also
have a plain TeX version, which I’m also willing to send. I’d be happy to rework this piece if any
ambitious historian of American mathematics out there wants to compile an
encyclopedia of what was going on at all the centers of activity, great and
small, during the early years of the Republic.
I think 1950 would be a good terminal year for such an encyclopedia. This is the one exception I would be willing
to make to my sworn intent (see above) not to get involved in any more projects
outside my main interest.
Apologia Pro
Vita Mea:
The immediate practical
value of what I do is very limited. My
whole background is "liberal artsy," and I regard simply understanding
the world, independently of any personal or economic gain, as being
practical. I'm very much in sympathy
with the ancient Greek ideals enunciated by Plato and Aristotle that education
should be aimed at this kind of understanding.
At the same time, I am enough of a realist to recognize that this kind
of education has an economic cost to society, and, as sardonic old Henry
Mencken wrote, one should not expect to be supported because he knows
Sumerian. Professors with my outlook owe
it to society to be good and dedicated teachers. We should not adopt the arrogant attitude of
Godfrey Harold Hardy, whose 1940 book A Mathematician's Apology argued
that, even if mathematics is a waste of time, Oxford dons should be allowed to
waste their time pursuing it. Such a
view is self-serving. Why should others work and be taxed or charged tuition in
order to support the production of papers that appeal only to a small
elite? If we expect such support, we
should honestly say why such knowledge is of value, and "sell" it
like any other commodity. The goal
should be to persuade others that understanding, without regard to economics,
is of value. In other words, we should
either perform a useful service for the community as a whole or enlarge the
elite who appreciate scholarship and willingly support it.
My Hobbies: Besides regular running for exercise,
gardening, and keeping up my languages (Russian, French, German, Japanese,
ancient Greek, Latin), I like to play the piano. With the Yamaha P-80 keyboard that my colleagues
so generously gave me when I retired, I have recorded some of my favorite
music. Here are two pieces by Chopin
that I particularly like, played by me with all the amateurish clinkers you'd
expect. I still regard it as a great
blessing to have been able to play these pieces, even very imperfectly, and I
rejoice that there are people who play them much better than I do, both
technically and artistically. As has
been said, the woods would be very silent if only the best birds sang. Here's my small peep. It is small only in a certain sense. These files are huge (14.5 MB and 7.5
MB respectively). Don't attempt to
download them over a 14.4 baud modem.