John Derbyshire

Visit the author's website at www.johnderbyshire.com.

John Derbyshire is a British-born author who lives in the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 2002. He is a columnist for the National Review Online and New English Review. He writes on a broad range of topics, including immigration, China, history, mathematics, culture, politics, and race. Derbyshire graduated from University College London, where he studied mathematics. His wife is originally from China and they have two children. Before turning to writing full-time, he worked on Wall Street as a computer programmer.

Derbyshire's novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge In a Dream was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year." His Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics was awarded the Mathematical Association of America's inaugural Euler Book Prize. His Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra covers the entire history of the subject, from 1800 B.C. down to the present day, describing all the main lines of development.

His excellent wikipedia page contains a comprehensive biography and discussion of his works.

WE ARE DOOMED: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (Crown, 2009)