Stanley Wagon is a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

mathematician, a professor of mathematics at

Macalester College Macalester College () is a private liberal arts college in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Founded in 1874, Macalester is exclusively an undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 2,174 students in the fall of 2018 from 50 U.S. states, four U.S te ...

Minnesota Minnesota () is a state in the upper midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to ...

. He is the author of multiple books on

number theory Number theory (or arithmetic or higher arithmetic in older usage) is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic function, integer-valued functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777� ...

, geometry, and computational mathematics, and is also known for his

snow sculpture Snow sculpture or snow art is a sculpture form comparable to sand sculpture or ice sculpture in that most of it is now practiced outdoors, and often in full view of spectators, thus giving it kinship to performance art in the eyes of some. The m ...

Biography

Wagon was born in Montreal, to Sam and Diana (Idlovitch) Wagon. His sister Lila (Wagon) Hope-Simpson died in 2021. Wagon did his undergraduate studies at

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...

in Montreal, graduating in 1971. He earned his Ph.D. in 1975 from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native A ...

, under the supervision of

James Earl Baumgartner James Earl Baumgartner (March 23, 1943 – December 28, 2011) was an American mathematician who worked in set theory, mathematical logic and foundations, and topology. Baumgartner was born in Wichita, Kansas, began his undergraduate study at the ...

. He married mathematician

Joan Hutchinson Joan Prince Hutchinson (born 1945) is an American mathematician and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Macalester College. Education Joan Hutchinson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; her father was a demographer and university professor, ...

, and the two of them shared a single faculty position at

Smith College Smith College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smith (Smith College ...

and again at Macalester, where they moved in 1990.

Books

*''

The Banach–Tarski Paradox ''The'' () is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite ...

'' (Cambridge University Press, 1985) *''Old and New Unsolved Problems in Plane Geometry and Number Theory'' (with

Victor Klee Victor LaRue Klee, Jr. (September 18, 1925 – August 17, 2007) was a mathematician specialising in convex sets, functional analysis, analysis of algorithms, optimization, and combinatorics. He spent almost his entire career at the University of ...

, Mathematical Association of America, 1991)
''Mathematica® in Action: Problem Solving Through Visualization and Computation''
(W.H. Freeman, 1991; 2nd ed., Springer, 1999; 3rd ed., Springer, 2010) *''Animating Calculus'' (with E. Packel, TELOS, 1996) *''Which Way Did the Bicycle Go?'' (with J. D. E. Konhauser and D. Velleman, Mathematical Association of America, 1996) *''VisualDSolve: Visualizing Differential Equations with Mathematica'' (with Dan Schwalbe, TELOS, 1997; 2nd ed., with Schwalbe and Antonin Slavik, Wolfram Research, 2009). *''A Course in Computational Number Theory'' (with

David Bressoud David Marius Bressoud (born March 27, 1950 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) is an American mathematician who works in number theory, combinatorics, and special functions. As of 2019 he is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College, ...

, Springer, 2000) *''The Mathematical Explorer'' (Wolfram Research, Inc., 2001) *''The SIAM 100-Digit Challenge: A Study in High-Accuracy Numerical Computing'' (with Laurie, Bornemann, and Waldvogel, SIAM, 2004)

Other activities

Wagon is also known for riding a

bicycle A bicycle, also called a pedal cycle, bike or cycle, is a human-powered or motor-powered assisted, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A is called a cyclist, or bicyclist. Bic ...

with

square wheel A square wheel is a wheel that, instead of being circular, has the shape of a square. While literal square wheels exist, a more common use is as an idiom meaning feeling bad and naive (see reinventing the wheel). A square wheel can roll smoothly ...

s, for his mathematical

s, and for having given the name to the

420 420 may refer to: * 420 (number) * 420 (cannabis culture), informal reference to cannabis use and celebrations on April 20 **California Senate Bill 420 or the Medical Marijuana Program Act *AD 420, a year in the 5th century of the Julian calendar * ...

Arch, a natural stone arch in southern Utah.

Awards and honors

Wagon won the

Lester R. Ford :''This is about early- and mid-20th-century mathematician. For his mathematician son, active from the mid-20th century, see L. R. Ford Jr.'' Lester Randolph Ford Sr. (October 25, 1886 – November 11, 1967) was an American mathematician, e ...

Award of the Mathematical Association of America for his 1988 paper, "Fourteen Proofs of a Result about Tiling a Rectangle". Wagon and his co-authors

Ellen Gethner Ellen Gethner is a US mathematician and computer scientist specializing in graph theory who won the Mathematical Association of America's Chauvenet Prize in 2002 with co-authors Stan Wagon and Brian Wick for their paper ''A stroll through the G ...

and Brian Wick won the

Chauvenet Prize The Chauvenet Prize is the highest award for mathematical expository writing. It consists of a prize of $1,000 and a certificate, and is awarded yearly by the Mathematical Association of America in recognition of an outstanding expository article ...

for mathematical exposition in 2002 for their 1998 paper, "A Stroll through the Gaussian Primes".Chauvenet Prize
MAA, retrieved 2012-03-10.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wagon, Stan Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Canadian mathematicians McGill University alumni Dartmouth College alumni Smith College faculty Macalester College faculty