Mathematics books by women, in need of more reviews
The last couple of years, for International Women’s Day, I’ve posted about mathematics books by women covered by recently added Wikipedia articles. I have a few more of those that I could list today, and a few more that I plan to add, but instead, I thought I’d list books on mathematics and related areas that look interesting enough to me that I want to add them to Wikipedia, but haven’t, because I haven’t found enough reviews to use as the basis for an article.
If you know of more reviews for these, please let me know! I need at least three in-depth reviews, published in journals or by major societies rather than just on a web site or someone’s blog, by three different reviewers, to be comfortable writing a Wikipedia article. It would also help convince other Wikipedians that the topic is a worthy one for Wikipedia if it had at least one review in an actual journal, not just in the MAA, EMS, AMS, and zbMATH review collections, for which one could argue that a review is “routine coverage” that doesn’t suggest any particular significance for a book. Even if you can’t find more reviews, you might find some of these titles and topics intriguing enough to read the books.
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A Course on Tug-of-War Games with Random Noise (2020), Marta Lewicka. Research monograph concerning a game-theoretic twist on Brownian motion. Reviewed by MAA and zbMATH. Listed by MathSciNet as “pending” so maybe there’ll be a third review soon.
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Alfonso’s Rectifying the Curved (2021), Ruth Glasner and Avinoam Baraness. A history of medieval Spanish circle-squaring. Reviewed by MAA.
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Bodies of Constant Width: An Introduction to Convex Geometry with Applications (2019), Horst Martini, Luis Montejano, and Déborah Oliveros. A very thorough reference on surfaces of constant width and related topics, one that I’ve used as a reference in several other Wikipedia articles. Reviewed by MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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Bubbles (2018), Helen Czerski. A children’s book on the science of bubbles and foam. I haven’t found any reviews.
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Certificates of Positivity for Real Polynomials (2021), Victoria Powers. Sum-of-squares optimization and the related Lasserre hierarchy has been a hot topic in theoretical computer science in recent years. A polynomial that can be represented as a sum of squares of other polynomials automatically takes only positive values, although the converse is untrue. This book concerns both the mathematical foundations and computational aspects of this topic. MathSciNet lists it only as “preliminary” and zbMATH gives only a publisher blurb.
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The Classification of Quadrilaterals: A Study in Definition (2008), Zalman Usiskin and Jennifer Griffin. This calls itself a “micro-curricular analysis” in mathematics education, on the best way to organize basic definitions of four-sided shapes in elementary geometry. The mathematics education community is usually pretty good about reviewing their books, but I haven’t found any reviews for this one.
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Combinatorial Rigidity (1993), Jack Graver, Brigitte Servatius, and Herman Servatius. Combinatorial and matroid-theoretic analysis of when a spatial structure made from rigid bars connected by flexible ball joints has some freedom of motion, and when its bars constrain it to a single configuration. I have three reviews for this one, in Bull. AMS, MathSciNet, and zbMATH, but they only count as two because the first two are by the same reviewer.
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Computability Theory (2012), Rebecca Weber. An undergraduate textbook on what can and cannot be computed by algorithms. Reviewed by MAA and zbMATH. It’s listed on MathSciNet, but only with a copy of the publisher’s blurb, not an actual review.
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Configurations from a Graphical Viewpoint (2013), Tomo Pisanski and Brigitte Servatius. A configuration, in this context, means a finite system of points and lines with uniform numbers of points per line and lines per point, or more abstractly a biregular graph. Reviewed in MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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Do Not Erase (2021), Jessica Wynne. I have this one in hardcopy. It’s a photo-essay of mathematicians’ blackboards, set side-by-side with personal reflections from each mathematician. Some of the boards are obviously set up with pretty diagrams specifically for the photo, while others show the blackboards as tools for recording work-in-progress. Reviewed by MAA and First Monday. MathSciNet has publisher’s blurb (surprising me a little that it was listed at all; usually they only cover graduate and research level mathematics). zbMATH lists it but with a blank review (they didn’t follow the instructions in the title).
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A Field Guide to Digital Color (2003), Maureen C. Stone. When I used to work at Xerox PARC, Stone was the go-to researcher there on anything related to color. I suspect that, despite its age, there’s still plenty of useful material in her book. But I haven’t found any reviews.
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Fixed Point Theory and Applications (2001), Ravi P. Agarwal, Maria Meehan, and Donal O’Regan. A well-cited reference work on the Brouwer fixed-point theorem and its relatives. Reviewed in MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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Geometric Group Theory: An Introduction (2017), Clara Löh. A graduate-level textbook in group theory, studying groups by their actions as symmetries of metric spaces. Reviewed in zbMATH, but MathSciNet has only the publisher’s blurb.
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Geometry of Cuts and Metrics (1997), Michel Deza and Monique Laurent. The polyhedral combinatorics of cut polytopes, with connections to the Kahn–Kalai counterexample to Borsuk’s conjecture on the existence of partitions of \(d\)-dimensional convex bodies into \(d+1\) pieces of smaller diameter. Reviewed in MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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Geometry: The Line and the Circle (2018), Maureen T. Carroll and Elyn Rykken. An undergraduate textbook on axiomatic geometry and non-Euclidean geometry. Reviewed by MAA and Monatsch. Math. Publisher blurb on zbMATH. Nothing on MathSciNet.
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Geometry Through History: Euclidean, Hyperbolic, and Projective Geometries (2018), Meighan Dillon. The title is a bit generic and makes this sound like a generic undergraduate textbook on non-Euclidean geometry. It could be used as that, but I think it goes beyond that as a thorough exploration of the history of thought that went into the development of non-Euclidean geometry. Reviewed by MAA and MathSciNet but only very briefly by zbMATH.
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Gröbner Bases in Commutative Algebra (2011), Viviana Ene and Jürgen Herzog. Gröbner bases are the key structure in a computational method for triangularizing systems of polynomial equations. In the worst case, this method has high complexity but in practice it often works. They’ve been rediscovered multiple times by multiple people, Gröbner not among them. This is one of several graduate textbooks on the subject. Reviewed by MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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A Guide to Experimental Algorithmics (2012), Catherine McGeoch. If you’re going to be doing experimental research on algorithms and their implementation, or guiding undergraduate research projects in this area, this is essential reading. I only know of the SIGACT News review.
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Hyperbolic Knot Theory (2020), Jessica Purcell. The space surrounding a knot can often be given a uniform geometric structure, in which the knot itself recedes to infinity, as depicted in the well-known video Not Knot. For most knots the resulting geometry is hyperbolic. This book brings this material to the level of an undergraduate text. Reviewed by MAA and zbMATH. Listed as pending by MathSciNet.
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Impossibility Results for Distributed Computing (2014), Hagit Attiya and Faith Ellen. Research monograph on applications of both information theory and combinatorics in showing that certain computations are impossible for distributed computing systems to perform. I only know of the zbMATH review.
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Information and Coding Theory (2000), Gareth Jones and J. Mary Jones. An undergraduate textbook on information theory, algebraic coding theory techniques, and their interrelations. Reviewed by Math. Gaz. and zbMATH.
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An Introduction to Lorentz Surfaces (1996), Tilla Weinstein. The Wikipedia article on Lorentz surfaces is not very informative but apparently they’re two-dimensional analogues of four-dimensional relativistic spacetime. Reviewed by MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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Leonardo’s Knots (2019), Caroline Cocciardi. A general audience book on the mathematical and aesthetic analysis of the knotwork visible in the artworks of Leonardo Da Vinci. Reviewed by MAA.
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Nonstandard Analysis in Practice (1995), edited by Francine Diener and Marc Diener. The topics in this edited volume on nonstandard analysis range from pedagogical to researchy. Reviewed by MathSciNet and briefly by zbMATH.
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Paradoxes and Sophisms in Calculus (2013), Sergiy Klymchuk and Susan Staples. Published several years earlier in New Zealand? Possibly most useful as a collection of examples for instructors. Reviewed by MAA and The Mathematics Teacher. MathSciNet and zbMATH both only have the publisher’s blurb.
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Ptolemy’s Philosophy: Mathematics as a Way of Life (2018), Jacqueline Feke. The context and motivation behind Ptolemy’s general philosophical system. Reviewed by Metaphilosophy and Int. J. Platonic Trad.
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Selected Topics in Convex Geometry (2006), Maria Moszyńska. This appears to be a graduate textbook in convex analysis, translated from a 2001 Polish version. Reviewed by MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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The Theory of Remainders (1995), Andrea Rothbart. A playfully-written introduction to number theory, aimed at middle school teachers. Reviewed in Bolema (a Brazilian mathematics education journal) and telegraphically in Amer. Math. Monthly.
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Tolerance Graphs (2004), Martin Charles Golumbic and Ann Trenk. Monograph on tolerance graphs, a class of perfect graphs generalizing interval graphs by requiring intervals to have a certain length of overlap in order to become adjacent. Reviewed by MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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Topics from One-Dimensional Dynamics (2004), Karen Brucks and Henk Bruin. Advanced undergraduate or introductory graduate text on dynamical systems theory. Reviewed by MathSciNet and zbMATH.
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Unitals in Projective Planes (2008), Susan Barwick and Gary Ebert. Research monograph on structures in finite geometries. Reviewed in zbMATH. MathSciNet has only the publisher’s blurb.