About Stan Wagon
Contact: wagon [at] macalester [dot] edu
Stan Wagon (born 1951, Montreal) is a professor of mathematics (retired) at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied at Monklands High School (class of 1967), McGill University (B.Sc. 1971), and Dartmouth College (Ph.D. 1975, under James E. Baumgartner). He then taught at Smith College until 1990, and Macalester College after that. Upon retirement from teaching in 2013 he and his wife, mathematician Joan Hutchinson, moved permanently to Silverthorne, Colorado.
His major mathematical works are a treatise on the Banach–Tarski Paradox, the construction of a bicycle that rides smoothly on square wheels, several other books (many focusing on Mathematica), and over 100 papers. He has won five writing awards for his mathematical papers. Together with Peter Gagarin and Fred Pilon, he founded Ultrarunning magazine in 1981, and has completed two 100-mile races (and one more on skis; 16 hours). Outside academia, he’s an avid climber, skier, and explorer. With others, he discovered and named 420 Arch and Hidden Moonshine Arch, and was the first to visit TipTop Arch, all in Utah. He and Katie Larson were the first to ski the Deming Drop near Frisco, Colorado.
This website documents his expeditions and photography in the mountains and deserts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, British Columbia, Alberta, and the Yukon. And the mathematics section contains much material about interesting puzzles, as well as some detail on his books, papers, and the famous square-wheel bicycle.
Stan’s Outdoor Adventures
Mathematics
Explore the SIAM 100-Digit Challenge, a book about a world-wide contest in 2002, and the VisualDSolve project, an e-book and Mathematica package for visualizing differential equations. Discover Wagon’s favorite mathematical puzzles and problems, browse his papers and books, and see how a snow sculpture got turned into the INVISIBLE HANDSHAKE granite sculpture at Macalester College.
