Draft:Peter Renz

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Peter Lewis Renz (born April 28, 1937, in Los Angeles, California) is an American writer, publisher, editor and mathematician known as an advocate for mathematics education and teaching reform.¹² Renz brought many of Martin Gardner’s recreational mathematics books to the Mathematical Association of America and was Gardner's editor at W. H. Freeman.³ In mathematics, Renz has published research in geometry, topology, analysis, and graph theory.⁴

Renz got a B.A. at Reed College (1959), an M.A. at the University of Pennsylvania (1960), and an M.S. at the University of Washington (1964). He got a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1969,⁵ with the dissertation Smooth extensions and extractions in infinite dimensional Banach spaces under the advisor Harry Herbert Corson, III.⁶ All degrees were in mathematics.

He was in the mathematics department at Wellesley College from 1969 to 1972 and did post-graduate work in biostatistics at the University of Washington, School of Public Health (1973–1974). In 1984 he went to Bard College where he became the mathematics department chair and taught there until 1986.

As an author, his articles on recreational mathematics have appeared in: Scientific American,⁷ American Mathematical Monthly,⁸ Two-Year College Mathematics Journal,⁹ Advances in Mathematics,¹⁰ American Journal of Physics,¹¹ Math Horizons,¹² and Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.¹³

In 1999, Renz and filmmaker George Csicsery created the documentary film I Want to Be a Mathematician: A Conversation with Paul Halmos.¹⁴

In 1962, Renz became an editor of the journal Advances in Mathematics founded by Gian-Carlo Rota.¹⁵

Renz joined W. H. Freeman and Company as an editor, where he facilitated the publication and republication of mathematical works by others, particularly those of Martin Gardner.¹⁶³ He was Gardner's editor there throughout the 1980s, and in the 2000s, they republished many collections of Gardners columns from Scientific American.¹⁷ He also arranged for Dover to republish Linus Pauling’s textbook, General Chemistry.¹⁸

Renz later became an editor for the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), where he again became Gardner's editor. At the MAA, he introduced Gardner fans to each other, Benoit Mandelbrot¹⁹ and Lynn Gamwell among them. Renz set up the MAA’s Gardner CD and produced second editions of Gardner's Mathematical Games books.²⁰ In 2009 he joined the MAA FOCUS Editorial Board.²¹

He has also edited books for Birkhäuser, Academic Press, and Springer Science.⁵ in 1992 he produced for Springer a revised edition of Discrete Thoughts by Mark Kac, Gian-Carlo Rota, and Jacob T. Schwartz.²²²³ In 2018, he helped publish Nicholas Wheeler's edited version of John von Neumann's Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.²⁴²⁵

Renz received the George Pólya Award in 1981 for his article, "Mathematical Proof: What It Is and What It Ought to Be".²⁶²⁷

Renz's parents were Margaret Lewis and Kenneth McKee Renz. He grew up in Los Angeles where Eric Temple Bell, Linus Pauling, and Fritz Zwicky were family friends. He is a mountain climber, and on August 6, 1969 was, along with Frank Tarver, the first person to scale Mount Prestley in British Columbia, Canada.²⁸ On July 17, 1970  he was with the first expedition to climb Ghost Peak in Washington State.²⁹

• "Shortest curves in Jordan regions vary continuously with the boundary" (Advances in Mathematics, 1994)⁴
• "Shortest paths in simply connected regions in ${\textstyle \mathbb {R} ^{2}}$" (Advances in Mathematics, 1989)¹⁰
• "Smooth extensions in infinite dimensional Banach spaces" Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 1972³⁰
• "Mathematical Proof: What It Is and What It Ought to Be" by Peter Renz, The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal, Vol 12 #2, 1981³¹
• "The contractibility of the homeomorphism group of some product spaces by Wong's method" (Mathematica Scandinavica, 1971)⁴
• "Equivalent flows on smooth Banach manifolds" (Indiana University Mathematics Journal, 1971)⁴
• "Smooth extensions and extractions in infinite dimensional Banach spaces" (Pacific Journal of Mathematics, 1970)³⁰