How Not to Be Wrong

Jordan Ellenberg is an American Mathematician and is currently the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was born in 1971 and grew up in Potomac, Maryland. Both of his parents were statisticians, which may have helped Ellenberg excel in mathematics from a young age. He competed for the U. S. in the International Mathematical Olympiad three times, winning two gold medals and a silver.

After receiving his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1993, Ellenberg obtained a master's degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. He then returned to Harvard to complete his Ph.D. in math.

Ellenberg has written both fiction and non-fiction. His novel, The Grasshopper King, was a finalist for the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award in 2004. He has been writing about math for a general audience for a number of years, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. He also occasionally writes a column entitled "Do the Math" for the on-line magazine Slate. His book, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking was named to multiple bestseller lists.

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