William Goldbloom Bloch

Professor of Mathematics
A. Howard Meneely Professorship (2015-2020)

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
B.A., Reed College

Publications

Open Discontinuous Maps From ℝn Onto ℝn,’ American Mathematical Monthly 122, no. 3, (2015), 268-272

Lost in a Good Book: Jorge Borges’ Inescapable Labyrinth,’ in Imagine Math: Between Culture and Mathematics. Michele Emmer, editor, Springer Verlag Italia, 2012, 155-165

On two of Zeno’s paradoxes,’ submitted to Mind

Fair and Unfair Division in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon,’ with Michael D. C. Drout, in Mathematics and Popular Culture, J. Sklar and E. Sklar, eds., MacFarland, 2012, 71-86

Fair and Unfair Division in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon,’ (with Michael Drout) in Mathematics and Popular Culture, 2011.

The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Fractal Boundaries are Not Typical,’ Topology and its Applications 154 (2007), 533-539

The Unimaginable: Catalogues and the Book of Sand in The Library of Babel,’ Variaciones Borges 19 (2005), 23-40

Typical Sets and Meager Spaces,’ Topology and its Applications 131 (2003), 39-49

Tension in Generalized Geometric Sequences,’ College Mathematics Journal 32, no. 1, (2001), 44-47

Extending Flows from Isolated Invariant Sets,’ Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems 15, no. 6, (1995), 1031-1043

Teaching Interests

  • Spellbinding lectures
  • Technology and its impact
  • Appropriate use of computers
  • Sensible and meaningful assessment

Personal interests include snowboarding, crossword puzzles, mountaineering and bicycling.

Research Interests

  • Information Theory
  • Claude Shannon
  • Berry’s Paradox
  • The Sorites Paradox
  • Zeno’s Paradoxes
  • Discontinuous open maps
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • Generic Topological Properties
  • Hyperbolic Flows on Smooth Manifolds

Department(s)

Economics
Mathematics

Program(s)

Office

Diana Davis Spencer Discovery Center 1307