Clifford Hugh Dowker

Clifford Hugh Dowker (born March 2, 1912 in Parkhill ( Ontario , Canada ), † October 14, 1982 in London , England ) was a Canadian mathematician .

Clifford Hugh Dowker initially studied physics and economics at the University of Toronto with the aim of teaching. Finally he turned to mathematics, went to Princeton University to Solomon Lefschetz , where he received his doctorate in 1938 with the dissertation Mapping Theorems in Non-Compact Spaces . From 1939 to 1940 he was an assistant to John von Neumann and then spent three years at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . There he met the Israeli mathematician Yael Naim , whom he married in 1944 before they both went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .

During World War II, he worked at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and on ballistics problems for the US Air Force . After the war, he initially taught at Tufts University . Dissatisfied with the conditions under the McCarthy era , he left the United States with his family in 1951 and took a position at Birkbeck College in London , his wife went to the University of Manchester . After a long illness, Dowker died on October 14, 1982 in London.

Dowker's main area of work before the war was topology ; after the war he occupied himself with applied mathematics . He also worked in category theory , sheaf theory and knot theory .

The Dowker rooms named after him play a role as counterexamples in the topology. They are normal but not countable, paracompact . Dowker had suspected that these did not exist, but an example was constructed in 1971 by Mary Ellen Rudin .

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Individual evidence

↑ CH Dowker On countably para compact spaces , Can. J. Math. 3: 219-224 (1951)

personal data
SURNAME	Dowker, Clifford Hugh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Canadian mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	March 2, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH	Parkhill , Ontario , Canada
DATE OF DEATH	October 14, 1982
Place of death	London

[1] CH Dowker On countably para compact spaces , Can. J. Math. 3: 219-224 (1951)