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.
In this editorial, the editor argues for keeping papers reasonably self-contained in mathematical journals.
For Whom Are We Writing Papers?
Leonard Gillman has a long and distinguished career as a concert pianist who earned a diploma in piano from the Julliard School of Music, an applied mathematician working for the United States Navy during the second world war, a set-theorist and topologist who wrote many research papers as well as being a co-author with Meyer Jerison of the definitive text "Rings of Continuous Functions" that set the tone for research in this area for the next quarter century, the builder of an excellent mathematics department at the University of Rochester, chairman of the mathematics department at the University of Texas, Secretary-Treasurer of the MAA for many years, and finally its President, author of many excellent expository articles for the American Mathematical Monthly as well as a monograph on how to write mathematics. He consented to summarize his career in a lengthy interview. The first part of the interview has appeared in Volume 2, #4. Here is the second and last part of the interview of Leonard Gillman.
Leonard Gillman; an interview, part 2
After some years, Professor W. Purkert of the University at Bonn took charge of preparing the Hausdorff edition for publication sometime in the next decade. Meanwhile, a large catalog (Findbuch) (450+ pages) has been prepared in LaTex giving detailed summaries of its contents, and he has been kind enough to let us post it in Topological Commentary. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.
It is written, of course, in German. Before I realized the massiveness of the Findbuch, I had hoped to publish an English translation simultaneously. The best I could do was to persuade a colleague (who wants to remain anonymous) from one of the Claremont Colleges to translate the excerpts from the introduction (Vorwort) into English that appears below. While all too brief, it gives some idea of the nature of the Hausdorff edition to those of us not sufficiently fluent in German. (We will be only too glad to post translations of other parts of the Findbuch that are sent to us.)
John Henderson Roberts, the 7th Ph.D. student of R. L. Moore, died at the Carolina Meadows Health Center in Chapel Hill, NC on October 8, 1997. This is a memorial for John Henderson Roberts by Richard E. Hodel of Duke University and Jerry E. Vaughan of University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Samuel Eilenberg, who made decisive contributions to topology and other areas of mathematics, died on Friday, Feb. 6 in New York City. This is a memorial for Samuel Eilenberg by Saunders MacLane of The University of Chicago.
A group of his former students and their students have developed an ongoing web site (http://www.discovery.utexas.edu/) on which they are recording the history of this highly successful method of teaching, the accomplishments of students who learned topology this way, and current efforts to carry it on in modified form. For anyone interested in the history of topology, examining this web site is a must.
The following book review appeared in the February 1998 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly and is posted here with the permission of the reviewer and the Mathematical Association of America.
This is a brief column concerned with qualifying exams in topology, by Scott Williams of S.U.N.Y in Buffalo.