The Crossing of Heaven - Memoirs of a Mathematician

Among the group of physics honors students huddled in 1957 on a Colorado mountain watching Sputnik bisect the heavens, one young scientist was destined, three short years later, to become a key player in America's own top-secret spy satellite program. One of our era's most prolific mathematicians, Karl Gustafson was given just two weeks to write the first US spy satellite's software. The project would fundamentally alter America's Cold War strategy, and this autobiographical account of a remarkable academic life spent in the top flight tells this fascinating inside story for the first time.
Gustafson takes you from his early pioneering work in computing, through fascinating encounters with Nobel laureates and Fields medalists, to his current observations on mathematics, science and life. He tells of brushes with death, being struck by lightning, and the beautiful women who have been a part of his journey.

List of contents

Preface.- 1 The Child in Iowa.- 2 The Boy in Boulder.- 3 The Student in Poverty.- 4 Computers and Espionage.- 5 First Publication.- 6 Into Academia.- 7 The World Opens.- 8 Personas and Personalities.- 9 Wives, Lovers, Friends.- 10 Close Calls.- 11 Mathematics.- 12 High Finance.- 13 The Improbabilities.- 14 Realities.- 15 The Crossing of Heaven.- Appendix.

Product details

• Authors: Karl Gustafson
• Assisted by: Ioannis Antoniou (Foreword)
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.02.2014
• EAN: 9783642441424
• ISBN: 978-3-642-44142-4
• No. of pages: 176
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 235 mm x 12 mm
• Weight: 301 g
• Illustrations: XVI, 176 p.
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Mathematics; B, History, Mathematics, Mathematics and Statistics, Data Structures and Information Theory, Applications of Mathematics, Mathematics, general, Finance & accounting, Computational Mathematics and Numerical Analysis, Algorithms & data structures, Computer mathematics, Numerical analysis, Information theory, Engineering mathematics, Applied mathematics, Economics, Mathematical, Quantitative Finance, History of mathematics, History of Mathematical Sciences, Data structures (Computer science), computing;espionage;satellites