Devlin has an upcoming biography of Fibonacci

From Keith Devlin's twitter feed (@nprmathguy): he's meeting with his publisher about a biography of Fibonacci which will come out this July, entitled The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution.

What surprises me most about this is that Devlin says that this is the first biography of Fibonacci. The St. Andrews' biographical page on him, for what it's worth, only lists two books among its sources. One is entitled Leonard of Pisa and the New Mathematics of the Middle Ages and the other Leonardi Pisani Liber Abbaci oder Lesevergnügen eines Mathematikers -- these don't sound like biographies. I'm surprised because you'd think there'd be a built-in market for such a book -- everyone knows about the Fibonacci sequence. And you could put bunnies on the cover! It looks as if Devlin's publishers are more serious than I am, though, and have not done so.

Richard Stallman: not a mathematician

Something I didn't know: Richard Stallman ("rms") of free software fame took Harvard's Math 55, often called "the hardest math class in the country". (I think I've linked to the Math 55 article before, but I can't find it.) He then took more math courses, and turned out to be quite good at it, but for some reason -- his biographer speculates it was because he shied away from the competitive aspects of mathematics -- he gravitated to computer science.

David Harbater (professor of mathematics at Penn) said of that class:

"only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.
"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."

Daniel Chess also makes an interesting point, about a "brilliant" proof that Stallman came up with his sophomore year:

"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician."

It's interesting that someone would even say this. Nobody would say that you don't have to be a great chef to recognize great cooking, because it goes without saying.

I learned this from Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams, which is available online for free.