Fred Richman
The goal of higher education is to
seduce students into a love of learning.
Barbara Lazear Ascher
Universities should not be brokers of the contemporary.
The purpose of education is to open the remote past to the
students, so they can learn from the voluminous human
record of mistakes and triumphs.
Camille Paglia
Technology is wonderfully exciting---and ultimately
irrelevant---but wonderfully exciting.
David Gelernter
Proof by contradiction is an elaborate dance where everything
turns out to be an illusion. Absurdities, instead of indicating
faulty reasoning, are actively sought, and any mistake you make
helps you toward your goal.
Vita
- Professor,
Department of Mathematics,
Florida Atlantic University,
1990.
- Professor,
New Mexico State University,
1971. (AP 1966, aP 1963)
- PhD, University of Chicago, 1963 (Irving Kaplansky).
- AB, Princeton University, 1958.
Research Interests
Abelian group theory and
constructive mathematics.
See
Confessions of a formalist, Platonist intuitionist
for a brief automathography.
Recent papers
- Real numbers and other completions,
Math. Logic Quarterly, 54 (2008), 98-108.
- Near convexity, metric convexity and convexity,
Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics, 37 (2007), 1305-1314.
- Almost locatedness in uniform spaces,
Czechoslovak Math. J., 57 (2007), 1-12, (with Bridges, Ishihara,
Mines, Schuster, and Vita).
- Subrings of zero-dimensional rings,
Multiplicative ideal theory in commutative rings, Springer 2007, 73-88, (with Jim Brewer)
- Van der Waerden's construction of a splitting field,
Comm. Algebra, 34 (2006), 2351-2356.
- Did Euclid need the Euclidean algorithm to prove unique factorization?,
Amer. Math. Monthly, 113 (2006), 196-205, (with David Pengelley).
- Pi-balanced torsion-free modules over a discrete valuation domain,
J. Alg., 295 (2006), 269-288,
(with David M. Arnold and K. M. Rangaswamy).
- Enabling
conditions for interpolated rings,
Proceedings of the Dagstuhl Seminar on Mathematics, Algorithms, and Proofs
(2006) .
- Constructive
aspects of Markov chains,
Journal of Universal Computer Science, 11, (2005) 2046-2055 (electronic)
- A division algorithm,
Journal of Algebra and its Applications, 4 (2005), Number 4, 441-449.
A textbook.
An introductory modern algebra text
for undergraduates.
A skeptical look at this perennial problem.
A poem about the
uncountability of the real numbers.
A proposal to eliminate countable
choice from constructive mathematics.
Links to my scripts on various mathematical topics.
Department of Mathematics
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida 33431-0991
Latitude 26 22 15 North, Longitude 80 6 10 West.
Office: Room 224, Science & Engineering
Phone: (561) 297-2484
Fax: (561) 297-2436
Email:
richman@fau.edu
Last modified 20 May 2008.