Paul J. Nahin

Paul Nahin was born in California, and did all his schooling there (Brea-Olinda High 1958, Stanford BS 1962, Caltech MS 1963, and - as a Howard Hughes Staff Doctoral Fellow - UC/Irvine PhD 1972, with all degrees in electrical engineering). He worked as a digital logic designer and radar systems engineer in the Southern California aerospace industry until 1971, when he started his academic career. He has taught at Harvey Mudd College, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Universities of New Hampshire (where he is now emeritus professor of electrical engineering) and Virginia. In between and here-and-there he spent a post-doctoral year at the Naval Research Laboratory, and a summer and a year at the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Defense Analyses as a weapon systems analyst, all in Washington, DC. He has published a couple dozen short science fiction stories in ANALOG, OMNI, and TWILIGHT ZONE magazines, and has written 24 books on mathematics and physics, published by IEEE Press, Springer, and the university presses of Johns Hopkins and Princeton. Translations of his books in Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Greek, Korean, Spanish, Romanian, and Japanese have appeared. The book THE MATHEMATICAL RADIO was published by Princeton in January 2024 and the book THE PROBABILITY INTEGRAL was published by Springer in October 2023. He has given invited talks on mathematics at the Anja Greer Math and Technology Conference at Phillips Exeter Academy (twice, in 2008 and 2018), as well as at Bowdoin College, the Claremont Graduate School, the University of Tennessee, and Caltech, has appeared on National Public Radio's "Science Friday" show (discussing time travel) as well as on New Hampshire Public Radio's "The Front Porch" show (discussing imaginary numbers), and advised Boston's WGBH Public Television's "Nova" program on the script for their time travel episode. He gave the invited Sampson Lectures for 2011 in Mathematics at Bates College (Lewiston, Maine). He received the 2017 Chandler Davis Prize for Excellence in Expository Writing in Mathematics.