Keith Devlin

He was born and grew up in England, in Kingston upon Hull. There he attended a local primary school followed by Greatfield High School in Hull. In the last school year he was appointed Head Boy. Devlin earned a BSc (Special) in Mathematics at King's College London in 1968, and a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Bristol in 1971 under the supervision of Frederick Rowbottom.[3][5]

Later he got a position as a Scientific Assistant in Mathematics at University of Oslo, Norway from August till December 1972. In 1974 he became a Scientific Assistant in Mathematics at University of Heidelberg, Germany. In 1976 he was an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at University of Toronto, Canada. From 1977 till 1987 he served as a Lecturer in Mathematics at University of Lancaster, England. From 2001 till 2009 he was a Consulting Professor, Stanford University: Department of Mathematics at Stanford, California.[6]

He is co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University's Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (2006), a co-founder of Stanford Media X university-industry research partnership program, and a Senior Researcher in the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).[3] He is a commentator on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Saturday, where he is known as "The Math Guy."[7]

His research is mainly focused on the use of different media to teach mathematics to different audiences. He is also co-founder and President the company BrainQuake, which creates mathematics learning video games, which he set up in 2011.[8] Other topics of his research are the theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition.[9]

As of 2012 he had authored 34 books and over 80 research articles.[3] Several of his books are aimed at a general audience.

• Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award, 2001[3]
• In 2007 he received Wonderfest's Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization.[10]
• 2004 International Pythagoras Prize in Mathematics, in the category Best Expository Text in the Mathematical Sciences for the Italian translation of The Millennium Problems[11]
• Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012[12]

Articles

• Devlin, Keith I.; Jensen, R. Björn (1975), "Marginalia to a theorem of Silver", ISILC Logic Conference (Proc. Internat. Summer Inst. and Logic Colloq., Kiel, 1974), Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 499, Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 115–142, doi:10.1007/BFb0079419, ISBN 978-3-540-07534-9, MR 0480036 [First proof of Jensen's covering theorem; Keith J. Devlin is credited as Keith I. Devlin in the paper.]

Books

• Constructibility. Springer. 1984. ISBN 3-540-13258-9.
• Logic and Information. Cambridge University Press. 1991. ISBN 0-521-49971-2.
• The Joy of Sets: Fundamentals of Contemporary Set Theory. Springer. 1993. ISBN 0-387-94094-4.
• Mathematics: The Science of Patterns. Holt Paperbacks. 1996. ISBN 0-8050-7344-2.
• Goodbye, Descartes: the End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of the Mind. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1997. ISBN 0-471-25186-0.
• The Language of Mathematics: Making the Invisible Visible. Holt Paperbacks. 1998. ISBN 0-8050-7254-3.
• Mathematics: The New Golden Age. Columbia University Press. 1999. ISBN 0-231-11639-X.
• Life by the Numbers. Wiley. 1999. ISBN 0471328227.
• The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip. Basic Books. 2000. ISBN 0-465-01619-7.
• The Millennium Problems: the Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time. Basic Books. 2002. ISBN 0-465-01730-4.
• The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (Along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs). Thunder's Mouth Press. 2006. ISBN 1-56025-839-X.
• The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics. Plume. 2007. ISBN 978-0-452-28857-7. with coauthor Gary Lorden
• The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern. Basic Books. 2008. ISBN 978-0-465-00910-7.
• The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution. Walker Publishing Co. 2011. ISBN 978-0-8027-7812-3.
• Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for Learning. A K Peters. 2011. ISBN 978-1-56881-431-5.
• Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. Keith Devlin (18 July 2012). 2012. ISBN 978-0615653631.

• Official website including his curriculum vitae
• Devlin's Angle — column at the Mathematical Association of America