Edwin Moise
Edwin Evariste Moise (pronounced [ moʊˈiːz ]) (born December 22, 1918 in New Orleans , † December 18, 1998 in New York City ) was an American mathematician who dealt with geometric topology and mathematics didactics.
Life
Moise studied mathematics at Tulane University and after graduating in 1940 worked as a cryptographer and Japanese translator for the US Navy. In 1947 he received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin with Robert Lee Moore in topology (An indecomposable continuum which is homeomorphic to each of its nondegenerate subcontinua), where he introduced the term "pseudo-arc". From 1947 to 1960 he taught at the University of Michigan , from 1949 to 1951 at the Institute for Advanced Study (as assistant to Deane Montgomery and again in 1956/57). At the end of the 1950s he worked in a textbook commission that was supposed to reform teaching in schools. From 1960 to 1971 he was Professor of Mathematics Didactics at Harvard . There he was at the end of the 1960s one of the few professors who publicly campaigned against the Vietnam War. 1971-1987 he was a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York . In retirement he turned to a new field and published several essays of literary criticism on poets of the 19th century.
Moise was a representative of the geometric topology from the Moore school like RH Bing and developed this from two- to three-dimensional problems. He proved the (essentially unambiguous) triangulability of 3-manifolds . RH Bing then gave another proof, and Moise a new proof in his textbook on geometrical topology. Like Bing, he worked hard to solve the Poincaré conjecture , but then gave up. Maybe that was one reason why he turned to mathematics didactics.
From 1958 he was involved in efforts to reform mathematics teaching and wrote textbooks for geometry teaching with Floyd L. Downs, which replaced the treatment according to the Euclidean postulates with new metric postulates, which was controversial at the time (among others, Saunders spoke out in favor of this MacLane out, against Morris Kline ).
Moise was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961), temporarily President of the Mathematical Association of America (the mathematics didactics association of the USA) and Vice-President of the American Mathematical Society . He was also on the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction.
He had been married since 1942 and had a daughter and a son.
Fonts
- Elementary Geometry from an Advanced Standpoint. 3. Edition. Addison-Wesley, 1990.
- with Floyd L. Downs: Geometry. Addison-Wesley 1964, 1991.
- The Number Systems of Elementary Mathematics. Counting, Measurement, and Coordinates. Addison-Wesley 1966.
- Calculus. Addison-Wesley 1967. 2nd edition 1972.
- Geometric Topology in Dimensions 2 and 3. Springer 1977.
- Introductory Problem Courses in Analysis and Topology. Springer 1982.
Web links
- Obituary in the New York Times, December 28, 1998
- Richard Anderson, Ben Fitzpatrick on Moise in the Topology Atlas, 2000
- Literature by and about Edwin Moise in the WorldCat bibliographic database
Individual evidence
- ^ Wolfgang Saxon: Edwin Evariste Moise, 79, Mathematics Scholar . In: New York Times , December 28, 2008. Retrieved September 7, 2008.
- ^ Moise, "Affine Structures in 3-manifolds V: The triangulation theorem and main presumption", Annals of Mathematics, Series 2, Vol. 56, 1952, pp. 96-114
- ↑ Anderson, Fitzpatrick in the Topology Atlas, 2000
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Moise, Edwin |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Moise, Edwin Evariste (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 22, 1918 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New Orleans |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 18, 1998 |
| Place of death | New York City |