Forbidding Land

Most adult Americans regard the world of mathematics with a sort of baffled awe. James R. Newman, 49, a Washington lawyer with a lively interest in tennis, chess and atomic energy and an academic background including graduate work in mathematics at Columbia University, is not one of these. He is fascinated by numbers. "I don't consider myself a mathematician," he says, "at least not an original, creative mathematician." But few professionals would quibble with Lawyer Newman's credentials as a gifted interpreter in their little-traveled land.

Last week Publishers Simon & Schuster were beaming over the page proofs of Newman's latest work that will be published next month. The World of Mathematics is a massive, four-volume anthology of the best writing in the field, from the time man started to figure on papyrus to the automatons that can replace man. The editors have reason to beam. The anthology is already a runaway bestseller--an astounding fact, since publishers traditionally expect prestige rather than profits from first-rate scientific books. Prodded by a $100,000 advertising campaign, the public has almost bought out the first printing of 100,000 at the prepublication price of $14.95. (Norman Vincent Peale's bestselling The Power of Positive Thinking had an advance sale of 44,831.)

Fissionable Personality. In the 15 years since Newman began working on the anthology with his left hand, his right hand has been busy with enough careers to fill a lifetime. During World War II he hopped between government agencies, spent a term as special assistant to Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson. In 1945 he became counsel to the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy. With the late Senator Brien McMahon, Newman helped write the key bill that placed atomic development under civilian control. Since the war he has been a magazine editor (Scientific American, the New Republic) and a visiting lecturer in law at Yale. Sometimes controversial and always spectacular wherever he goes, Newman was once described as a "remarkably fissionable personality."

Newman's personal radioactivity occasionally sizzles through in the 1,100,000 words of his anthology. He professes surprise at finding "independence of judgment and boldness of conception" in the writing of an engineer (Frederick William Lanchester). Later he suggests that mathematicians should examine the beautiful and the good because "philosophers, theologians, writers on esthetics and other experts have been probing these matters for more than 2,000 years without making any notable advance."

Newman's commentaries deftly introduce such diverse figures as Physicists Galileo and Newton, Economists Keynes and Malthus, Mathematicians von Neumann and Russell, Humorists Carroll (who also taught geometry) and Leacock. The subject matter is equally varied, includes Daniel Bernoulli's kinetic theory of gases, Clement Durell's discussion of Einstein's theory of relativity ("It is against common sense," says Newman of the theory, "but so at first were the ideas of vaccination and of men living upside down in the Antipodes"), a mathematical assessment of military strength by Frederick Lanchester (Newman notes that abstract theories of science often turn out to be quite practical, "as if one bought a top hat for a wedding and discovered later, when a fire broke out, that it could be used as a water bucket"), and the two-dimensional world of Edwin A. Abbott, inhabited by characters cut from plane geometry.

Obscene Quantities. Newman feels about the 15 years he spent on his anthology as he feels about his adolescence: "I don't begrudge the time, but I wouldn't want to repeat it." Vacationing on Cape Cod last week, he attributed the thumping advance sales to guilt feelings on the part of adults about their lack of mathematical knowledge. "That's probably why they're buying my book in such obscene quantities," he speculated. "They may feel that if they can make some human contact with this terrifying subject, they'll be able to find some entrance, some passage through it."

Says Anthologist Newman (coauthor with Edward Kasner of Mathematics and the Imagination, a 1940 bestseller): "I'm dumbfounded at the reception the books have got. I don't write for a living. I wrote these books because I enjoyed doing it and, I suppose, because I wanted to hear myself talk--which is every author's reason for writing. The World of Mathematics is a very good book, but the fact that it's selling so well is really unrelated to the quality of the book--up to now, at least, because all that people have seen is the table of contents. It must be there's enough in the table of contents to draw people's imagination and make them want to go on--even though it is in a field which is generally thought of as forbidding."

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