Eventually I'll find the mentions of Amos by Noam Chomsky and I.A. Richards.
Every once in a while Amos comes to mind along with Serge Lang and his attempt to hold Samuel P. Huntington to account for 'pseudo science' and using Mathematics as propaganda. I had stumbled on Serge Lang by chance, out of curiosity about who had made the plain Geometry textbook that I still have from 1985.
This time around was the first time I remember seeing anything about Neil Koblitz.[1]
- [1] From the WikiPedia page about Neal Koblitz
Koblitz's 1981 article "Mathematics as Propaganda"[4] criticized the misuse of mathematics in the social sciences and helped motivate Serge Lang's successful challenge to the nomination of political scientist Samuel P. Huntington to the National Academy of Sciences.[5] In The Mathematical Intelligencer, Koblitz,[6][7][8] Steven Weintraub,[9] and Saunders Mac Lane later criticized the arguments of Herbert A. Simon, who had attempted to defend Huntington's work.[10]
He co-invented Elliptic-curve cryptography in 1985,[11] with Victor S. Miller and for this was awarded the Levchin Prize [12] in 2021.
With his wife Ann Hibner Koblitz, he in 1985 founded the Kovalevskaia Prize, to honour women scientists in developing countries. It was financed from the royalties of Ann Hibner Koblitz's 1983 biography of Sofia Kovalevskaia.[13] Although the awardees have ranged over many fields of science, one of the 2011 winners was a Vietnamese mathematician, Lê Thị Thanh Nhàn.
