[math-fun] Author! Author!
The 1982 "A Number for your Thoughts" by Stephen P. Richards appears to have a doppelgänger in a 1986 version by Malcolm E. Lines. Does anybody know why the name changed?
I've established at least that Malcolm Ellis Lines (born 26 Apr 1936) is a real person/author/patent-holder associated with AT&T and apparently living in Millington NJ. The self-published Stephen P. Richards version of "A Number for your Thoughts" gives a post box in New Providence NJ, not far away. Internet "name farms" (which I frequently use for genealogical research) suggest that there is a (born ~1969) Stephen P. Lines in Malcolm's family. Could be coincidental of course but it is suggestive.
"The 1982 'A Number for your Thoughts' by Stephen P. Richards appears to have a doppelgänger in a 1986 version by Malcolm E. Lines. Does anybody know why the name changed?" The Stephen P. Richards authorship is pseudonymous. Malcolm E. Lines wrote the book, he explained to me: "when I was employed at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ as a theoretical condensed matter theorist. Since I was regularly publishing research papers in various learned journals in the early 1980s, I decided to keep my book written for a wider readership totally apart from my formally more academic books and papers by writing it under a pseudonym. It also seemed a good idea not to let my employer know that I was 'wasting my time' on such sidelines." A second title that sports the Richards pseudonym is the 1987 'Numbers at Work and at Play' which was republished in 1990 by Lines under the title 'Think of a Number'.
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Hans Havermann