In the Dark on the Sunny Side: A Memoir of an Out-of-Sight Mathematician by Larry W. Baggett is now available in the MAA Store. Misfortune struck on June day in 1944, when a five-year-old boy was forever blinded following an accident he suffered with a paring knife. Few people become internationally recognized research mathematicians and famously successful university professors of that erudite subject, and not surprisingly a minuscule number of those few are visually impaired. In the Dark on the Sunnyside tells the story of one such individual. The author was main-streamed in school long before main-streaming was common. On almost every occasion he was the first blind person involved in whatever was going on - the first blind student enrolled in the Orlando Public School System, the first blind student admitted to Davidson College, and the first blind doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Washington.
Despite the bad luck that June day, there was good fortune ahead. In addition to all the remarkable people who helped Baggett to join and prosper quite normally in the sighted world, he also had two "inward" outlets that made his life not just easier but gave it meaning, pleasure, and excitement. One was music and the other was mathematics. He may lie awake at night analyzing the chord changes to a jazz tune like "'Round Midnight", or he may be working out the details of the proof of the Spectral Theorem for an unbounded operator.
In addition to describing the various successes and failures Baggett experienced living in the dark on the sunny side, he displays his love of math and music by interspersing short musings on both topics, such as discussing how to figure out how many dominoes are in a set, the intricacies of jazz chord progressions, and the mysterious Comma of Pythagoras.
Get your copy of In the Dark on the Sunny Side: A Memoir of an Out-of-Sight Mathematician by Larry W. Baggett in the MAA Store.
No comments:
Post a Comment