Stan Wagon


Stanley Wagon is a Canadian-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is the author of multiple books on number theory, geometry, and computational mathematics, and is also known for his snow sculpture.

Biography

Wagon was born in Montreal, and did his undergraduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1971. He earned his Ph.D. in 1975 from Dartmouth College, under the supervision of James Earl Baumgartner. He married mathematician Joan Hutchinson, and the two of them shared a single faculty position at Smith College and again at Macalester, where they moved in 1990.

Books

Wagon is also known for riding a bicycle with square wheels, for his mathematical snow sculptures,
and for having given the name to the 420 Arch, a natural stone arch in southern Utah.

Awards and honors

Wagon won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for his 1988 paper, "Fourteen Proofs of a Result about Tiling a Rectangle". Wagon and his co-authors Ellen Gethner and Brian Wick won the Chauvenet Prize for mathematical exposition in 2002 for their 1998 paper, "A Stroll through the Gaussian Primes".