JOSEPH MAZUR

Meaning? The Origins of Modern Icons, Signs and Symbols in Mathematics, Poetry and Life. It will trace the origins and evolution of commonly used symbols in both mathematics and daily life—the square root symbol, the symbol @​ (commercial at) that is now used in email addresses with the modern meaning “found at,” and the icons on commercial products such as those found on the dashboards of new cars. These were consciously invented, as were most mathematical symbols, which fall into convention; however, they tend to perpetually evolve into images that evoke subliminal sharply focused perception. Such symbols seem to be distinct from the innate, yet culturally flexible: emotional music symbols such as those found in Mozart operas, dream symbols that Jung attributed to human symbol-forming propensity, and architectural symbols such as those high-relief decorations found on ancient temples. And then there is poetry, the means and medium for expressing human relationship to the world, where, as Emerson put it, “Words are signs of natural facts.” Traced to its root, each word becomes a symbol used to express a moral or intellectual fact borrowed from some material appearance.

Archimedes Takes The A-Train: The Boy Who Thought He 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. Final fieldwork for this book will begin in the fall of 2009.

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.