Sherman Kopald Stein (born August 11, 1926) is an American mathematician and an author of mathematics textbooks. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis. His writings have won the

Lester R. Ford Award Lester is an ancient Anglo-Saxon surname and given name. Notable people and characters with the name include: People Given name * Lester Bangs (1948–1982), American music critic * Lester W. Bentley (1908–1972), American artist from Wisc ...

and the Beckenbach Book Prize.

Life

Stein was born on August 11, 1926, in Minneapolis; his father was a bookbinder. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1946. He completed his doctorate at Columbia University in 1952. His dissertation, ''The Homology of the Two-Fold Symmetric Product'', was supervised by

Paul Althaus Smith Paul Althaus Smith (May 18, 1900June 13, 1980) was an American mathematician. His name occurs in two significant conjectures in geometric topology: the Smith conjecture, which is now a theorem, and the Hilbert–Smith conjecture, which was proved ...

. Stein worked as a mathematics instructor at Princeton University for a year, and then joined the mathematics faculty at the University of California, Davis in 1953. He retired in 1993.

Books

Stein is the author of: *''Mathematics: The Man-Made Universe: An Introduction to the Spirit of Mathematics'' (W. H. Freeman, 1963; 3rd ed., Dover, 1998) *''Calculus in the First Three Dimensions'' (McGraw-Hill, 1967) *''Calculus for the Natural and Social Sciences'' (McGraw-Hill, 1968) *''Calculus and Analytic Geometry'' (McGraw-Hill, 1968; 5th ed., 1992) *''Elementary Algebra: A Guided Inquiry'' (with Calvin D. Crabill, Houghton Mifflin, 1972) *''Geometry: A Guided Inquiry'' (with G. D. Chakerian and Calvin D. Crabill, Houghton Mifflin, 1972) *''Algebra II/Trigonometry'' (with Calvin D. Crabill, W. H. Freeman, 1976) *''An Introduction to Differential Equations'' (with Anthony Barcellos, McGraw-Hill, 1994) *'' Algebra and Tiling: Homomorphisms in the Service of Geometry'' (with Sándor Szabó, Mathematical Association of America, 1994) *''Strength in Numbers: Discovering the Joy and Power of Mathematics in Everyday Life'' (Wiley, 1996) *''Archimedes: What Did He Do besides Cry Eureka?'' (Mathematical Association of America, 1999) *''How the Other Half Thinks: Adventures in Mathematical Reasoning'' (McGraw-Hill, 2001; reprinted as ''Adventures in Mathematical Reasoning'', Dover, 2016) *''Survival Guide for Outsiders: How to Protect Yourself from Politicians, Experts and Other Insiders'' (BookSurge, 2010). The book ''Algebra and Tiling: Homomorphisms in the Service of Geometry'', written by Stein and Szabó, won the 1998 Beckenbach Book Prize of the

Mathematical Association of America The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure a ...

Other contributions

Stein's doctoral research was in topology, but his research interests later shifted to abstract algebra and

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many appl ...

. In combinatorics, he is known for formulating the

tripod packing In combinatorics, tripod packing is a problem of finding many disjoint tripods in a three-dimensional grid, where a tripod is an infinite polycube, the union of the grid cubes along three positive axis-aligned rays with a shared apex. Several pr ...

problem. The tripods of this problem are infinite polycubes, the unions of the lattice cubes along three axis-parallel rays, and they have also been called "Stein corners" in honor of his contributions to this problem. Stein is also known as one of the independent discoverers of Fáry's theorem, and for his contributions to

equidissection In geometry, an equidissection is a partition of a polygon into triangles of equal area. The study of equidissections began in the late 1960s with Monsky's theorem, which states that a square cannot be equidissected into an odd number of triang ...

, the partition of polygons into triangles of equal area. Stein won the

of the

in 1975 for a paper on the connections between group theory and tessellations.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Stein, Sherman K. Living people 20th-century American mathematicians California Institute of Technology alumni Columbia University alumni Princeton University faculty University of California, Davis faculty 1926 births