Amir Aczel

Amir Dan Aczel (Hebrew: עמיר דן עכשאל; /ɑːˈmɪər ɑːkˈsɛl/; November 6, 1950 – November 26, 2015) was an Israeli-born American lecturer in mathematics and the history of mathematics and science, and an author of popular science.

Amir D. Aczel was born in Haifa, Israel. Amir graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa, in 1969.

When Aczel was 21, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated with a BA in mathematics in 1975 and received a Master of Science in 1976. Several years later, Aczel earned a PhD in statistics from the University of Oregon. He married his wife Debra in 1984, and had one daughter and one stepdaughter.

Aczel taught mathematics at universities in California, Alaska, Massachusetts, Italy and Greece. He accepted a professorship at Bentley College in Massachusetts, where he taught classes on statistics, the history of science, and the history of mathematics. He authored two textbooks on statistics.

While teaching at Bentley, Aczel wrote several non-technical books on mathematics and science, as well as two textbooks. His book Fermat's Last Theorem was a United States bestseller and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Aczel was a 2004 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a visiting scholar in the History of Science at Harvard University (2007), and was awarded a Sloan Foundation grant to research his book Finding Zero (2015). In 2003, he became a research fellow at the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science, and in the fall of 2011, was teaching mathematics courses at University of Massachusetts Boston. He was a speaker at La Ciudad de las Ideas in, Puebla, Mexico, in 2008 and 2011.

In 2015, Aczel died in Nîmes, France from cancer.