In the Dark on the Sunny Side: A Memoir of an Out-of-Sight Mathematician (Spectrum)

Misfortune struck one June day in 1944, when a five-year-old boy was forever blinded following an accident he suffered with a paring knife. Few people become internationally recognized research mathematicians and famously successful university professors of that erudite subject, and not surprisingly a minuscule number of those few are visually impaired. In the Dark on the Sunny Side tells the story of one such individual. Larry Baggett was main-streamed in school long before main-streaming was at all common. On almost every occasion he was the first blind person involved in whatever was going on the first blind student enrolled in the Orlando Public School System, the first blind student admitted to Davidson College, and the first blind doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Washington. Besides describing the various successes and failures Baggett experienced living in the dark on the sunny side, he displays in this volume his love of math and music by interspersing short musings on both topics, such as discussing how to figure out how many dominoes are in a set, the intricacies of jazz chord progressions, and the mysterious Comma of Pythagoras.