Stories by Amir Alexander

Amir Alexander is a writer, historian, and mathematician living in Los Angeles. His latest book, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World, brings to life the fierce struggles surrounding the infinitely small in the 17th century. At stake, he shows, was not just a mathematical concept, but the shape of the modern world, its social hierarchies and political order. Since the book's publication by Farrar Strauss and Giroux / Scientific American in April of 2014, Amir has been interviewed about it on NPR 's "All Things Considered" and "Interfaith Voices," and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

In Duel at Dawn, published by Harvard University Press in 2010, Amir offers a look at three romantic young mathematicians – Galois, Abel, and Bolyai – and shows how their mathematical breakthroughs are inseparable from their short and tragic lives and from the legends that grew around them. Writing in the New Criterion, Martin Gardner called the book, "a marvelous history." Amir's first book, Geometrical Landscapes, shows how early mathematicians came to view their research as a heroic voyage of exploration, setting the stage for modern mathematics. Called "an exceptional, seminal work" by Choice magazine, it was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.

Amir has taught history, philosophy, and the history of science at Stanford and UCLA, served on the editorial board of the journal Isis, and published extensively in academic journals. He is a contributor to the New York Times' Science Times section and has written for the Los Angeles Times' Op-Ed section. His many popular articles on space-related topics have been extremely successful with the general public and have been translated into more than a dozen languages.