Maths Book Comes Home
31 May 2011 - 09:42:44 in Interesting
A book won as a maths prize at Victoria University in 1944 has come home after it was spotted at a charity bookshop in England.
A volunteer at the Oxfam bookshop in Thame, Oxfordshire found the book among others donated from the estate of Professor John Ziman, who grew up in Hamilton and later studied at Victoria. The volunteer contacted the University and posted the book back to New Zealand.
As a student at what was then Victoria College, Professor Ziman won the MacMorran Prize, awarded annually to the best second-year mathematics student. He used the prize money to buy The Development of Mathematics by E T Bell, the book that turned up 67 years later.
Professor Megan Clark, Head of the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research says that she was delighted when she was contacted about the book.
"It was such a surprise to hear from the bookshop on the other side of the world and I'm delighted they got in touch to see if we would like the book for our archives. John Ziman was well-known in the UK as a physicist and wrote a number of groundbreaking books. What's more, one of our current academics, Professor Rob Goldblatt is one of his descendants so it really feels like the book has come home," says Professor Clark.
Professor Ziman, a physicist and philosopher, was interested in the role science played in politics and society.
As well as a leading career in Physics, Professor Ziman wrote extensively on how scientific research and innovation is affected by social, political and cultural values, and how science, in turn, affects society. He also argued strongly for scientists to have a greater sense of social responsibility.
After completing his PhD in mathematics and physics at Oxford, Professor Ziman lectured at Oxford and Cambridge universities. He was later a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkley and Professor at Bristol University. In 1967, he was elected to the Royal Society, London.
He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree by Victoria University in 1985.
The photos below are of Felix Barber, a third year student majoring in both mathematics and physics, who is the current holder of the MacMorran prize for Mathematics.
