JOSEPH MAZUR

Meaning? The Origins of Modern Icons, Signs and Symbols in Mathematics, Poetry and Life. A book that traces the origins and evolution of commonly used symbols in mathematics, art, and literature. It will explore the differences and parallels of three apparently distinct categories of symbols: the invented, the metaphorical, and the archetypical. Human-made symbols such as the square root, the ampersand and icons on commercial products are discursive symbols that seem to be distinct from the culturally flexible, emotional symbols found in operas or from the metaphorical symbols found in poems, and even further distinct from the innate dream symbols that Jung attributed to archetypes. However, those humanly made symbols also tend to perpetually evolve into images that evoke subliminal sharply focused perceptions and emotions. Traced to their roots, symbols are the means of perceiving, recognizing and processing meaning out of patterns and configurations drawn from material appearance. My project will result in a book that will show how symbols used in mathematics are also borrowed from experiences to transfer metaphorical thoughts capable of conveying meaning through similarity, analogy and resemblance.

Zola Takes The A-Train: The Girl Who Thought She Hated Math. Written in the first person voice of a teenager living in the South Bronx, this book will be a partly fictional account of life in an inner-city high school under the mentorship of dedicated science and math teaching. It will be based on factual and carefully studied observations and follow those observations as closely as prosaically possible. Many recent books focus on what’s wrong with American science and math education. Undoubtedly, there is plenty wrong. This book will focus on what’s right by documenting the fine skills of a enthusiastic teacher who leads students to questions they ask themselves. In the time of one semester this teacher turns apprehensive math-hating teenagers into confident math-loving students.

The Amazing Light Bulb Change: a memoir containing elements of math discovery influenced by his first nonfiction book, Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Math.

Excerpt--
Chapter 1 Claremont Park

There are those smoldering points of a life, places in one’s history to where reminiscences are drawn by a familiar smell, a spoken word, an intimate piece of music or the taste of something as innocent as cinnamon. One of mine is a memory of Claremont Park. For almost half a century I imagined it half buried deep under the roadbed of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. It was a pleasing park. Its well-kept pansy gardens bordered two broad, parallel avenues of gray hexagonal paving stones. A wide island of multicolored flowers and tall trees ran between the avenues. Grandma Civeta’s (pronounced Sve·tà) favorite bench was under a massive sycamore, whose powerful roots radically unleveled the paving, permitting moss and dandelions to grow in cracks. From her bench she could see the pink and red roses finely clinging to a large stone wall that separated the quiet gardens from the crowded playground and delight in watching a few butterflies happily dance among the petals. In the shade of that sycamore she sat, unbothered by falling cottonball fruit and powerful scent of marigolds, watching squirrels scrabble for those breadcrumbs pigeons missed in the cracks. The tree continuously flaked its brown bark, exposing a cream and ashen underbark, but its most distinguished blemishes came from knife blade engravings of cousin Arthur’s initials circumscribing the enormous trunk. Whenever I pass freshly watered pansy beds, see tree roots ripping up pavement or smell the strong scent of marigolds, I am drawn to one foretelling day of my childhood when Civeta brought Barry and me to Claremont Park.