What I Did Last Summer, What I'm Doing This Summer, And What (God Willing) I'll Be Doing Next Summer

by Paul J. Nahin

Each faculty member has different obligations, demands, and desires that collectively determine how he or she spend their 'free time.' For me it is writing that fills the time that is mine. When I'm not in class (or preparing to be in class), or going to department meetings, or talking with students, or serving on department, college or university committee assignments, I write books.

Last summer I was finishing-up the final corrections to my new book An Imaginary Tale: the story of the square root of minus one, which will be published this October by Princeton University Press. It contains lots of history, as well as complex number math through the Cauchy integral theorems, and has been taken by the Library of Science Book Club as a selection. It was originally written as the class notes for a University Gen Ed Freshman/Sophomore Honors Seminar (INCO 404, 'History of complex numbers') during the Fall of 1996.

This summer I am reading the copy-edited typescript of Time Machines 2, the second edition (greatly expanded and up-dated, as well as corrected) of the 1993 Time Machines, which will be published in September by Springer-Verlag. Springer bought the book from the original publisher, the Press of the American Institute of Physics (AIP Press), and also hired my original editor; a lucky stroke for me since she and I have worked well together for over five years. The new Time Machines will be the main text in a University Gen Ed Freshman/Sophomore Honors Seminar (INCO 404, 'Time travel in fiction') that I am teaching in the Fall. In addition, I have started the writing of the second edition of The Science of Radio, first published in 1995 by AIP Press but now also under contract to Springer-Verlag. Its big, new feature will be the use of both MATLAB and ELECTRONICS WORKBENCH.

And finally, I am just now finishing a new-book-proposal for Probability Puzzlers, based on my years of teaching probability theory to electrical engineers in EE647. If that attracts a contract, well then, the summer after next will be all planned, too: more writing!