Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart was born in 1945 and educated at Cambridge (MA) and Warwick (Ph.D.). He is an Emeritus Professor in the Mathematics Department at Warwick University, where he divides his time equally between research into nonlinear dynamics and furthering public awareness of mathematics. He is also an Emeritus Professor at Gresham College, London. 

He has held visiting positions in Germany, New Zealand, and the USA. He has five honorary doctorates (Open University, Westminster, Louvain, Kingston, and Brighton) and is an honorary wizard of Unseen University on Discworld. He is best known for his popular science writing—mainly on mathematical themes. His awards include the Royal Society’s Faraday Medal (1995), the IMA Gold Medal (2000), the AAAS Public Understanding of Science and Technology Award (2001), the LMS/IMA Zeeman Medal (2008), and the Lewis Thomas Prize (2015, joint with Steven Strogatz). 

Jointly with Martin Golubitsky, he won the 2001 Balaguer Prize. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. His book Nature’s Numbers was shortlisted for the 1996 Rhone-Poulenc Prize for Science Books, and Why Beauty is Truth was shortlisted for the 2008 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. His iPad app Incredible Numbers, a collaboration with TouchPress and Profile Books, won the DigitalBookWorld Award for adult nonfiction in 2015 and was selected as one of the 24 'Best Apps of 2014' in the US and Canadian App Stores. 

In 2018 he received the Pythagorean Universe Award from the Centre for Advanced Studies, Warsaw University of Technology. He became a Master's at the Centre for Advanced Studies, Warsaw University of Technology. He delivered the 1997 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC television and repeated them in Japan in 1998. The final lecture began by bringing a live tiger into the lecture room. He has made nearly 450 radio broadcasts and 80 television appearances.

He has published over 120 books, including Nature's Numbers; The Collapse of Chaos (with Jack Cohen); Fearful Symmetry (with Martin Golubitsky); Does God Play Dice?; Why Beauty is Truth, Letters to a Young Mathematician, Life’s Other Secret, the US bestseller Flatterland, and the bestselling Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities and Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures. Recent books are Mathematics of Life, the number one popular science bestseller 17 Equations That Changed the World, The Great Mathematical Problems, and Symmetry: a Very Short Introduction. 

He has also collaborated with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen on the series The Science of Discworld I, II, III, and IV, all of which reached number 1 or 2 in the Sunday Times bestseller list. The first book in the series was nominated for a Hugo award at the World Science Fiction Convention in 2000. The Italian translation of Letters to a Young Mathematician won the 2006 Peano Prize. Jointly with Steven Strogatz, he won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing in 2015. 

In Pursuit of the Unknown (US title of Seventeen Equations That Changed the World) won the 2017 Euler Book Prize. I Numeri Uno, the Italian translation of Significant Figures, won the inaugural Premio Internazionale Cosmos in Reggio Calabria, Italy, in 2019. He has contributed to various newspapers and magazines in the UK, Europe, and the USA, including New Scientist and Scientific American. He has been a mathematics consultant for New Scientist and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

He wrote the monthly ‘Mathematical Recreations’ column in Scientific American for twelve years. He is the author of several research texts, including The Symmetry Perspective (with Martin Golubitsky), Singularities and Groups in Bifurcation Theory (with Martin Golubitsky and David Schaeffer), and Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications (with Tim Poston).

He is also a critically acclaimed science-fiction author. He has published several SF short stories (several in Nature) as well as the novels Wheelers and Heaven (with Jack Cohen), The Living Labyrinth and Rock Star (with Tim Poston), and Jack of All Trades. He won the Bloody Stupid Johnson Award for Innovative Uses of Mathematics at the 2016 Discworld Convention. He was Science Guest of Honour and a Hugo Award Presenter at Worldcon75 (World Science Fiction Convention), Helsinki 2017.

He is an active research mathematician with over 200 published papers and currently works on pattern formation, chaos, network dynamics, and biomathematics. He lives in Coventry, UK, and is married (50 years and counting) with two sons, three grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.