Peter Renz
Peter Lewis Renz (born April 28, 1937, in Los Angeles, California) is an American publisher, editor and mathematician known as an advocate for mathematics education and teaching reform.[1][2] Renz brought many of Martin Gardner’s recreational mathematics books to the Mathematical Association of America, and was Gardner's editor at W. H. Freeman.[3] In mathematics, Renz has published research in geometry, topology, analysis, and graph theory.[4]
Education and career
Renz got a B.A. at Reed College (1959), an M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania (1960), and an M.S. at the University of Washington (1964). He got a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1969,[5] with the dissertation Smooth extensions and extractions in infinite dimensional Banach spaces under the advisor Harry Herbert Corson, III.[6] All degrees were in mathematics.
He was in the mathematics department at Wellesley College from 1969 to 1972. He did post-graduate work in biostatistics at the University of Washington, School of Public Health (1973–1974). In 1984 he went to Bard College where he became the mathematics department chair and taught there until 1986.
As an author, his articles on recreational mathematic have appeared in: Scientific American,[7] American Mathematical Monthly,[8] Two-Year College Mathematics Journal,[9] Advances in Mathematics, American Journal of Physics,[10] Math Horizons,[11] and Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.
In 1999, Renz and filmmaker George Csicsery created the documentary film I Want to Be a Mathematician: A Conversation with Paul Halmos.[12]
Publishing career
In 1962, Renz founded the journal Advances in Mathematics with Gian-Carlo Rota.[13]
Renz joined W. H. Freeman and Company as an editor, where he facilitated the publication and republication of mathematical works by others, particularly those of Martin Gardner.[14][3] He was Gardner's editor there throughout the 1980s, and in the 2000s, they republished many collections of Gardners columns from Scientific American.[15] He also arranged for Dover to republish Linus Pauling’s widely used textbook, General Chemistry.[16]
Renz later became an editor for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), where he again became Gardner's editor. At the MAA, he introduced Gardner fans to each other, Benoit Mandelbrot[17] and Lynn Gamwell among them. Renz set up the MAA’s Gardner CD and produced second editions of Gardner's Mathematical Games books.[18] In 2009 he joined the MAA FOCUS Editorial Board.[19]
He has also edited books for Birkhäuser, Academic Press, and Springer Science.[5] in 1992 he produced for Springer a revised edition of Discrete Thoughts by Mark Kac, Gian-Carlo Rota, and Jacob T. Schwartz.[20][21] In 2018, he helped publish Nicholas Wheeler's edited version of John von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.[22][23]
Awards
Renz received the George Pólya Award in 1981 for his article, "Mathematical Proof: What It Is and What It Ought to Be".[24][25]
Personal life
Renz's parents were Margaret Lewis and Kenneth McKee Renz. He grew up in Los Angeles where Eric Temple Bell, Linus Pauling, and Fritz Zwicky were family friends. He is a mountain climber, and on August 6, 1969 was, along with Frank Tarver, the first person to scale Mount Prestley in British Columbia, Canada.[26] On July 17, 1970 he was with the first expedition to climb Ghost Peak in Washington State.[27]
Selected papers
- "Shortest curves in Jordan regions vary continuously with the boundary" (Advances in Mathematics, 1994)[4]
- "Shortest paths in simply connected regions in " (Advances in Mathematics, 1989)[4]
- "Smooth extensions in infinite dimensional Banach spaces" Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 1972[28]
- "Mathematical Proof: What It Is and What It Ought to Be" by Peter Renz, The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, Vol 12 #2, 1981[29]
- "The contractibility of the homeomorphism group of some product spaces by Wong's method" (Mathematica Scandinavica, 1971)[4]
- "Equivalent flows on smooth Banach manifolds" (Indiana University Mathematics Journal, 1971)[4]
- "Smooth extensions and extractions in infinite dimensional Banach spaces" (Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 1970)[28]
References
- ↑ The Moore Method: What Discovery Learning Is and How It Works by Peter Renz
- ↑ Steps toward a rethinking of the foundations and purposes of Introductory Calculus by Peter Renz, Mathematical Association of America< DOI:10.13140/2.1.2896.8644
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Peter Renz Memories of Martin Gardner Notices of the AMS, vol 58 #3, p. 421
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Peter L. Renz at Google Scholar
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Martin Gardner: Defending the Honor of the Human Mind" The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, vol. 10, no. 4, 1979, pp. 227-232
- ↑ Peter Lewis Renz at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ Martin Gardner Tribute Issues and Cover Stories Gathering for Gardner
- ↑ "Thoughts on Innumeracy: Mathematics Versus the World?" by Peter Renz, The American Mathematical Monthly, 100(8), pp. 732–742. doi: 10.1080/00029890.1993.11990479
- ↑ A Conversation with Martin Gardner The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, Vol 10, No 4, pp. 233-244, Sep 1979
- ↑ Order and Surprise, by Martin Gardner and Peter Renz, American Journal of Physics, vol 52, # 2, February 1984
- ↑ A Long Loving Look at Mathematics by Peter Renz, Math Horizons, Vol. 4, No. 4 (April 1997), pp 16-22
- ↑ I Want To Be A Mathematician Internet Archive
- ↑ Rota mourned by students and colleagues MIT News, April 28, 1999
- ↑ Gathering 4 Gardner "... my work with Martin Gardner and others (Edward Teller, John Conway, Richard K. Guy, Julian Schwinger, Don Knuth, C. N. Yang, Harold Jacobs, Nathan Jacobsen, Doug Hofstadter, Scott Kim, Linus Pauling, Jerry Marsden, Tony Tromba, Bob Bonnie, Serge Lange, John Milnor, Peter and Anneli Lax, Benoit Mandelbrot, Mark Kac, John Archibald Wheeler, Hans Bethe, Sherman Stein, …)" Gathering 4 Gardner, May 30, 2025
- ↑ Martin Gardner and Scientific American: The Magazine, Columns, and the Legacy by Peter L. Renz, gathering4gardner.org
- ↑ The Pauling Blog
- ↑ Chapter 19: Benoit Mandelbrot, W. H. Freeman, and the launch of The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Peter Renz, World Scientific, May 2015
- ↑ What made 'Mathematical Games' special martin-gardner.org
- ↑ MAA Focus, The Newsmagazine of the Mathematical Association of America March 2009, Vol 29 No 2
- ↑ Gian-Carlo Rota, Notices of the AMS, vol 47 #2, p. 207
- ↑ Discrete Thoughts: Essays on Mathematics, Science and Philosophy by Kac, Rota, and Schwartz
- ↑ Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: New Edition by John Von Neumann, Princeton Landmarks in Mathematics and Physics, Published on Feb 27, 2018 by Princeton University Press
- ↑ From the Preface: I thank especially Marina von Neumann Whitman, Freeman Dyson and Peter Renz.
- ↑ Mathematical Proof: What it is and what it ought to be The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal], vol. 12, no. 2, 30 Jan 2018
- ↑ George Pólya Award Collection 1970s, 1980s George Pólya Award Collection 1970s, 1980s
- ↑ "Mount Prestley". Bivouac.com. Retrieved 2019-12-15.
- ↑ Ghost Peak Climbing Mountain Project, Jan 24, 2021 mountainproject.com
- ↑ 28.0 28.1 Peter Renz at ResearchGate
- ↑ Mathematical Proof: What It Is and What It Ought to Be The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Mar., 1981), pp. 83-103
External links
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- American mathematicians
- Mathematics popularizers
- Mathematics writers
- Recreational mathematicians
- Reed College faculty
- Wellesley College faculty
- Bard College faculty
- Reed College alumni
- University of Pennsylvania alumni
- University of Washington alumni
- 20th-century American publishers (people)
- 21st-century American publishers (people)
- 1937 births
