Clifford A. Pickover

Clifford A. Pickover is an American science writer, researcher, and prolific popularizer of mathematics and the history of ideas, with a PhD from Yale University in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. He spent decades as a researcher at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he also served as editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, and holds hundreds of U.S. patents. Alongside that research career, he has published more than fifty books, many of them large-format, richly illustrated surveys that walk general readers through the history of a field via hundreds of short, dated entries — The Math Book, The Physics Book, The Science Book, and Death and the Afterlife among them. The Math Book won the 2011 Neumann Prize, and his writing consistently pairs rigorous subject knowledge with an eye for the strange, the beautiful, and the counterintuitive corners of science and mathematics. In this catalogue, Pickover is credited as a co-author with the celebrated fantasy and science fiction novelist Piers Anthony, reflecting his occasional work outside straightforward nonfiction popularization. Readers who enjoy his catalogued title should look to his standalone reference-style books — The Math Book or The Science Book are natural starting points — for the format he is most associated with: bite-sized, visually driven tours through centuries of ideas, aimed at curious general readers rather than specialists.