Richard Schwartz (mathematician) facts for kids

Richard Evan Schwartz, born on August 11, 1966, is an American mathematician. He is known for his work in a field called geometric group theory. This area of mathematics connects shapes and patterns with numbers. He also studies "billiards," which are like math games based on shapes. Schwartz created a cool math idea called the pentagram map. He even wrote a fun math picture book for young kids! As of 2018, he teaches math at Brown University.

His Life and Work

Richard Schwartz was born in Los Angeles on August 11, 1966. He went to John F. Kennedy High School. Later, he studied mathematics at U.C.L.A.. He earned his Ph.D. in math from Princeton University in 1991.

He taught at the University of Maryland. Today, he is a professor of mathematics at Brown University. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Barrington, Rhode Island.

The Pentagram Map

Schwartz is famous among mathematicians for creating the pentagram map. Imagine a shape with many sides, like a polygon. You draw lines inside it, connecting points that are not next to each other. These lines cross each other.

Where the lines cross, they form a new, smaller polygon inside the first one. You can keep doing this process over and over! Schwartz studied these patterns. He even used computers to help him explore these cool geometric ideas.

He worked with other mathematicians, Valentin Ovsienko and Sergei Tabachnikov. Together, they showed that the pentagram map is "completely integrable." This means it follows very predictable and organized rules.

Fun Facts and Hobbies

When he's not doing math, Schwartz enjoys drawing comic books. He also writes computer programs and listens to music. He likes to exercise too.

He once played an April Fool's joke on his fellow math professors at Brown University. He sent an email suggesting that students should be admitted to the university randomly. He even made up fake studies to support his idea! This funny story was reported in the Brown Daily Herald newspaper. His friends say he has a "very wry sense of humor."

You Can Count on Monsters

In 2003, Schwartz was teaching his young daughter about numbers. He made a poster of the first 100 numbers using colorful monsters. This idea grew into a math book for young children.

The book, called You Can Count on Monsters, came out in 2010. It became a bestseller! Each monster in the book helps kids learn about numbers. For example, the monster for the number five was a five-sided star, like a pentagram. It teaches about prime numbers or factoring.

In 2011, the book was featured on National Public Radio. It became a bestseller on Amazon for a few days. The Los Angeles Times said the book helped make arithmetic less scary. Mathematician Keith Devlin said Schwartz "skillfully and subtly embeds mathematical ideas into the drawings."

Awards and Honors

• 1993 National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
• 1996 Sloan Research Fellow
• 2002 Invited Speaker, International Congress of Mathematicians, Beijing
• 2003 Guggenheim Fellow
• 2009 Clay Research Scholar
• 2017 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society for his work in math.