Joseph Mazur

His full name is Joseph Conrad Mazur. His mother bought a used copy of Lord Jim in London on her way from Vienna to America, thinking that if she could read it with a dictionary it might improve her English. Like Mazur's mother, Conrad was Polish-born, so she felt that English written by a Pole must be easy to understand.

JOSEPH MAZUR is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Marlboro College where he has taught a wide range of classes in all areas of mathematics, its history and philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from M.I.T., and is a Guggenheim Fellow. He is the author of Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Mathematics (Finalist of the 2005 PEN/​Martha Albrand Award and chosen as one of Choice's 2005 Outstanding Academic Titles of the Year) and the editor of the recently republished classic by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science. He is the author of The Motion Paradox: The 2,500-Year Old Puzzle Behind All the Mysteries of Time and Space (Plume), What's Luck Got to do With it?, (Princeton), Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers (Princeton), Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidences (Basic), and The Clock Mirage: The Myth of Measured Time (Yale). His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.