Speaking to the Public: Mathematicians on American Radio, the 1920s through the 1940s.

Science Service's coverage of Fermat's last theorem had evidently improved by 1939, when it reported on progress made by Cornell University mathematician J. Barkley Rosser under the more accurate title "Old Mathematical Puzzle Still Intrigues Science" [[47]].[15] Yet another article summarized the status of other deceptively simple "puzzles" of number theory - the search for odd perfect numbers, the distribution of primes, and the Goldbach conjecture - underscoring the fact that mathematicians did not have all the answers [[46]].[16] By the 1940s, first the mobilization of scientists for an ultimate war effort and then the war itself and defense research came to dominate science news, but a catchall "Review of the Year" in I Science News-Letter i in 1940 that highlighted defense research also included a substantial list of mathematical accomplishments under the subheading "Four Colors Suffice for 35 Regions on Sphere" [[18]]. Still, for mathematics as well as for all the sciences, Edward Scripps's vision of Science Service in the service both of science and of "making democracy ... more intelligent" through accessible reporting on scientific research of all kinds was realized in print over the course of the immediately post-World War I decades. Author of such widely read books as I Men of Mathematics i and I The Queen of the Sciences i , Bell was listed in the national I Radio Guide i for Saturday, February 8, 1936, as a "Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology" speaking on mathematics as part of the program "Searchers of the Unknown" [[14]].[39] Slotted from 10:30 to 11:00 PM EST on WABC, Bell's broadcast appears not to have been a Science Service talk and was twice as long as those generally ran. Science Service in the Service of Science A substantial amount of the science news of the time in the United States emanated from just one organization, Science Service. [Extracted from the article]