Underwood Dudley

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Underwood Dudley (born January 6, 1937) is an American

pseudomathematicians who incorrectly believe they have squared the circle
or done other impossible things.

Career

Dudley was born in

College Mathematics Journal and the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, and was a Pólya Lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) for two years. He is the discoverer of the Dudley triangle
.

Publications

Dudley's popular books include

Trevor Evans Award
for expository writing from the MAA in 1996.

Dudley has also written and edited straightforward mathematical works such as Readings for Calculus (MAA 1993,

ISBN 978-0-88385-347-4
), published under Mathematical Association of America's Dolciani Mathematical Expositions.

Lawsuit

In 1995, Dudley was one of several people sued by William Dilworth for defamation because Mathematical Cranks included an analysis of Dilworth's "A correction in set theory",[1] an attempted refutation of Cantor's diagonal method. The suit was dismissed in 1996 due to failure to state a claim.

The dismissal was upheld on appeal in a decision written by jurist Richard Posner. From the decision: "A crank is a person inexplicably obsessed by an obviously unsound idea—a person with a bee in his bonnet. To call a person a crank is to say that because of some quirk of temperament he is wasting his time pursuing a line of thought that is plainly without merit or promise ... To call a person a crank is basically just a colorful and insulting way of expressing disagreement with his master idea, and it therefore belongs to the language of controversy rather than to the language of defamation."[2]

See also

References

  1. ^ Dilworth, William (1974), "A correction in Set Theory" (PDF), Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 62: 205–216, retrieved June 16, 2016
  2. ^ Caselaw: United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, ruling on Dillworth vs. Dudley, 1996

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Underwood Dudley.
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