Who is David Pierce?
- 1965.03.15
- Richmond, Virginia
- 1974–1983
- St Albans School, Washington, D.C.
- 1983–1987
- St John's College, Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico
- 1988.05–1988.12
- Sleepy Creek Farm, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia
- 1989–1997
- Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park
- 1996.08–1996.12
- The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, Toronto
- 1997.08–1997.12
- Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- 1998.01–1998.06
- Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, California
- 1998.08–1998.12
- Interval in Turkey
- 1999.01–2000.06
- Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
- 2000–
- Mathematics Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey
I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, in one house until I was two, and then another. I have dim memories of the first house.
In the second grade of the local public school, our teacher read us The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary. I wanted to read for myself, so my father took me to the public library, where we found the book. Beyond this, some of my earliest library memories involve checking out books on mathematics.
In high-school geometry class, tenth grade, I didn't understand why we used a modern textbook rather than Euclid's Elements. A year later, I learned that there was a college where one read Euclid and other great ancients. I wanted to go there, and when the time came, I did.
At college, in Santa Fe, I became vegetarian, partially because I thought the meatless options at the cafeteria were better than the others.
I left college saying I would go to graduate school in physics, philosophy or mathematics. Before I could make up my mind what to do, the opportunity arose to work at an organic vegetable farm. I decided to find out where food came from.
At the farm, I learned to spend all day outdoors, usually bent over—and I learned to cook for the six of us exploited workers when it was my turn, and to eat a lot.
At the farm, in a dream, I knew I had to learn mathematics. So I did. In graduate school, I had no goal, other than this learning.
I had various living arrangements in graduate school, culminating in my joining a vegetarian cooperative house in Mount Pleasant in Washington, D.C. We six merely rented the house from its ex-patriate owners; we were cooperative in our sharing of food and chores and life in general. Our house held more bicycles than people; one person at most had a car.
The Mathematical Genealogy Project enables me to make the following list. I should like to think that teacher-student connexions are at least slightly more significant than blood-lines!
| mathematician | A | B | other links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Laskowski | |||
| Leo Harrington | |||
| Gerald Sacks | |||
| John Barkley Rosser | archives | ||
| Alonzo Church | X | X | |
| Oswald Veblen | X | ||
| Eliakim Moore | X | ||
| H. A. Newton | |||
| Michel Chasles | en français | ||
| Simeon Poisson | X | ||
| Joseph Lagrange | X | ||
| Leonhard Euler | X | ||
| Johann Bernoulli | X | ||
| Jacob Bernoulli | X |
In the preceeding table, links in column A are to biographies in the MacTutor archive; in B, in W. W. Rouse Ball.
I once selected a few of my favorite paintings from the National Gallery of Art in Washington:
- Argenteuil by Monet
- La Mousmé by van Gogh
- Lavender Mist by Jackson Pollock
I have spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the following books; they are friends.
- Will Lawson, The Drinker's Guide to the Middle East (Rebel, Inc.). In the spring of 1998, I found this paperback volume in an anarchist bookshop on Haight Street in San Francisco. The book is extremely funny—and now I know why the author speaks well of long-distance bus-rides in Turkey. The author has now discovered my mention of his book here and has kindly sent me a novel of his, in the form of a cd scanned from a typescript; it is named for a Turkish brand of cigarette.
- R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford, 1938). It was first recommended by my former high-school art-teacher around the fall of 1987.
- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (another web version). The book may have helped me to recognize, when I found out about St John's, that this college was the place to go.
- W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge. I can still shed a tear over the reunion of Larry, Isabel and Gray in Paris. (I also repeatedly read Maugham's collected short stories.)
- Reps and Senzaki, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (selections)
- Barbara Savage, Miles From Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycling Adventure (The Mountaineers) I got my copy from a bicycling friend who joined me for the first few hours of my trip from DC to Lake Huron via Niagara Falls.
- Cleese and Booth, The Complete Fawlty Towers
By the laws of Turkey, my relationship with Ayşe Berkman became a marriage in 2000.
