Edwin Spanier
Edwin Henry Spanier (born August 8, 1921 in Washington, DC , † October 11, 1996 in Scottsdale , Arizona ) was an American mathematician who, among other things , dealt with algebraic topology .
Live and act
Edwin Spanier studied at the University of Minnesota (Master in 1941) and - after serving in the US Army Signal Corps in World War II - received his doctorate there in 1947 under Norman Steenrod ( The Cohomology Theory of General Spaces ). In 1947/48 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study (and also in 1951 and 1958/59) and from 1948 at the University of Chicago . In 1952/53 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Paris . In 1959 he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley , where he established a school of algebraic topology.
In 1949 he classified the continuous mappings of topological spaces on spheres with the cohomotopy groups of Karol Borsuk . During his time in Chicago he studied the homology groups of fiber bundles with Shiing-Shen Chern . With JHC Whitehead in 1955 he introduced a duality concept named after them into the theory of homotopy. With JW Alexander he introduced the Alexander-Spanier cohomology (that is, around 1948 he developed Alexander's concept from 1935).
From the 1960s, he also dealt with the theory of formal languages in collaboration with Seymour Ginsburg. In 1983 he and colleagues published a proof of decidability in context-free grammars.
Spanier is best known as the author of the long-standing standard work Algebraic Topology , first published by McGraw Hill in 1966.
Morris Hirsch is one of his PhD students .
Fonts
- Algebraic topology. Corrected reprint, Springer-Verlag, New York / Berlin 1981, ISBN 0-387-90646-0 .
literature
- Morris W. Hirsch: Edwin Henry Spanier (1921–1996) (PDF; 80 kB), Notices of the AMS 45, 1998, pp. 704–705
Web links
- Literature by and about Edwin Spanier in the catalog of the German National Library
- John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Edwin Spanier. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
- Mathematics Genealogy Project
Individual evidence
- ↑ Spaniards on Borsuk's cohomotopy groups, Annals of Mathematics, Volume 50, 1949, pp 203-245
- ↑ Chern, Spanier, The homotopy structure of sphere bundles, Proc. Nat. Acad. USA, Vol. 36, 1950, pp. 248-255
- ↑ Spanier, Whitehead, Duality in homotopy theory , Mathematika 2, 1955, pp. 56-80
- ^ Spanier, Cohomology theory for general spaces, Annals of Mathematics, Volume 49, 1948, pp. 407-427.
- ^ S. Ginsburg, J. Goldstine, E. Spanier, On the equality of grammatical families, J. Comput. Syst. Sci., Vol. 26, 1983, pp. 171-196
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Spaniard, Edwin |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Spaniard, Edwin Henry (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American mathematician and university professor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 8, 1921 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Washington, DC |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 11, 1996 |
| Place of death | Scottsdale , Arizona |