commentary@mail.mathatlas.yorku.ca
While it was not planned that way, each of the contributors to this issue is a distinguished member of the faculty at the State University of New York at Buffalo who has made substantial contributions to topology.
Scott Williams is famous for his work on box products, set theory, and topological dynamics on "big" spaces. In this volume, he writes on Affirmative Action and the struggle that he and others have gone through to succeed in academia.
This provocative article is the first of many he will write and edit independently that will appear with each issue of TopCom.
Kenneth Magill has done substantial work in general topology, not the least of which is his series of papers on remainders in compactifications of locally compact spaces. More recently, he has turned his attention to semigroups of self maps of topological spaces. He was kind enough to conduct an interview with his colleague John Isbell, who is famous for the breadth as well as the depth of his contributions to mathematics. An incomplete sample of his work includes excellent contributions to the theory of games (the subject of his doctoral dissertation), general topology, ordered algebraic systems, and category theory. His book on uniform spaces is one anyone who wishes to work in this area must read (while grumbling about its terseness). Isbell and Magill are to be congratulated for capturing the essence of Isbell's character in a brief interview.
I continue to invite commentary on any article in any issue of TopCom or on any topic of general interest to topologists, including news about topologists or topological activity. Technical improvements in Topology Atlas will soon make it easy to send such commentary directly be E-mail, and I hope that readers will take advantage of this opportunity.
The next issue of TopCom will include (at least) a reprinting of an article written by me in 1993 in the Mathematical Intellingencer about how some mathematicians try to inhibit publication of papers in areas they do not like, as well as another interview.
Note: A large percentage of the 1989 version of this document appeared, more that 18 months after its submission, as a 1991 View Point article in the Buffalo News.