Angles of Reflection: A Memoir of Logic and a Mother's Love

FROM THE PUBLISHER

At the time her nine-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumor, Joan Richards was deeply involved in writing a book about the life and work of the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus De Morgan. Immersed in this abstract, logical world of science, Richards was forced by her son's sudden illness to confront a different kind of reality--the irrational world of a serious family illness and its consequences.

An intellectual memoir, Angles of Reflection portrays a woman deeply enmeshed in two male-dominated worlds--nineteenth century mathematics and twentieth century research academics--struggling to integrate the competing demands of family and career without sacrificing one to the other. As the strain of caring for her sick child mounts, Richards' view of De Morgan broadens to include his family in ways that both illuminate his work and force her to reevaluate her own career and relationships. In the process, she gives new meaning to the term "applied mathematics" by drawing life lessons out of De Morgan's logic, Newton's absolute space and time, and Leibnitz's relative visions of reality. She emerges from her ordeal profoundly altered, with a new appreciation of the ways that life, family, and work can inform and enrich one another.

Filled with insightful discussions of the debates among some of the finest mathematical minds of the 17th through 19th centuries, Angles of Reflection is both an intellectual journey through the history of mathematics and a gripping testament to maternal love.

About the Author:

Joan Richards is an Associate Professor of the History of Mathematics at Brown University. In addition to articles and reviews for scholarly publications, she is the author of Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England.

FROM THE CRITICS

Taconic Newspapers

Her story is every mother's story.

Brown Alumni Magazine

An eloquent memoir. Richards writes powerfully of her struggle to reconcile the messiness of her personal life with the neat absolutes of her mathematical training. . In the end the two stories need each other; each deepens the other's meaning. Just like a mother and child.

Publishers Weekly

Richards, a professor of the history of science at Brown, was looking forward to a long-anticipated sabbatical when her nine-year-old son developed a seizure disorder. Putting aside her own work, upon which her chance for a promotion rested, Richards saw Ned through successful brain surgery before resuming plans to bring her family to Berlin, where she had been granted a prestigious fellowship. Another medical emergency soon arose, however, and Richards spent the entire stay in Germany worried about Ned's increasingly complex prognosis and negotiating the labyrinthine medical system. These frustrations led her to question the validity of the Victorian models of thinking that were to have been the core of her research project. "My understanding was coming apart at the seams," she writes in this gripping memoir. "My experience was making me a traitor to [the] world where the public and private were sharply defined and not to be mixed. I had lost [Victorian scientists'] clear understanding of the real and the unreal." When Ned finally recovered, Richards produced not the expected scholarly study on 19th century probabilistic thought but this personal account of how her private experience deepened her understanding of her academic specialty. A gifted writer, Richards is at her best in describing her fears for her son and the conflicting demands of career and motherhood. Although it's surprising that she never really challenges the power structure that expects her to produce work at any cost, her memoir is an exceptionally articulate study of how we deal with what we cannot control. Agent, Sally Brady. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Booknews

In this narrative, Richards (history of mathematics, Brown, U.) interweaves her experiences with her son, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age nine, and her concurrent intellectual involvement with the life and work of the 19th-century mathematician Augustus De Morgan. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Tanya Luhrmann - New York Times Book Review

You see [Richards's] terror and insecurity and frustration up close, in the minutiae of caring for a sick child . . . [It] has a matter-of-fact straightforwardness as gripping as a whodunit, but it is fundamentally a philosophical essay on mathematics.Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Joan Richards, one of our leading historians of science, has written a tale of three cities and two time frames. Angles of Reflection gives a contrapuntal account of her experience as the mother of an injured son and her professional perceptions as a biographer of Augustus De Morgan. I found it unique in its display of courage and resolution and in its blend of the personal and the historical. — (Philip J. Davis, co-author of The Mathematical Experience)

A gripping story, at once an intensely personal account by a mother of her child's illnesses and a reexamination of the history of probability theory by an accomplished historian of mathematics. Joan Richards writes with intelligence and sensitivity, and--a rare accomplishment--she uses her experiences of family and work to brilliantly illuminate one another. This is a highly original book, beautifully and passionately written. It is both edifying and pleasurable to read. — (Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)

I found Joan Richards' Angles of Reflection to be a brave and moving book. Brave because she dares to breach the wall between her profession and her love for her endangered child. I read eagerly, wanting to know if mother and child would triumph over the rigidities of both medicine and academia. Her courage in breaching the wall between the personal and the professional leads to a new understanding of both, first in her life and then in ours. — (Susan Quinn, author of Marie Curie: A Life and A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney)