At the time her nine-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumour, Joan Richards was deeply involved in writing a book about the life and work of the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus De Morgan. Immersed in this abstract, logical world of science, Richards was forced by her son's sudden illness to confront a different kind of reality - the irrational world of a serious family illness and its consequences.
An intellectual memoir, Angles of Reflection portrays a woman deeply enmeshed in two male-dominated worlds-nineteenth-century mathematics and twentieth-century research academics-struggling to integrate the competing demands of family and career without sacrificing one to the other. As the strain of caring for her sick child mounts, Richards's view of De Morgan broadens to include his family in ways that both illuminate his work and force her to reevaluate her own career and relationships. In the process, she gives new meaning to the term 'applied mathematics' by drawing life lessons from De Morgan's logic, Newton's absolute space and time, and Leibnitz's relative visions of reality. She emerges from her ordeal profoundly altered, with a new appreciation of the ways in which life, family, and work can inform and enrich one another.
Filled with insightful discussions of the debates between some of the finest mathematical minds of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, Angles of Reflection is both an intellectual journey through the history of mathematics and a gripping testament to maternal love.