Gordon Thomas Whyburn

Gordon Thomas Whyburn ( born January 7, 1904 in Lewisville, Texas, † September 8, 1969 in Charlottesville, Virginia) was an American mathematician who worked on the topology of point sets.

Whyburn studied at the University of Texas at Austin Chemistry ( bachelor's degree in 1925 ) and moved to the influence of his teacher, Robert Lee Moore to mathematics, but made yet in 1926 his master's degree in chemistry. In 1927 he received his doctorate in mathematics and was an adjunct professor at the University of Texas. 1929/30, he as a Guggenheim Fellow in Vienna with Hans Hahn and in Warsaw in Kazimierz Kuratowski and Sierpinski was. After that, he was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and from 1934 professor at the University of Virginia, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was chairman of the mathematics department there, but resigned in 1966 after a first heart attack back of it. His successor as Dean became his student Edwin E. Floyd. Whyburn was, among other 1952/3 visiting professor at Stanford University.

His brother William Marvin Whyburn (1901-1972) was also a mathematician who studied with him in Austin and later a professor at UCLA, was dedicated to ordinary differential equations.

In 1938 he received the Chauvenet Prize.

Since 1925 he was married to the mathematician Lucille Smith.

Writings

• Analytic Topology, AMS 1942
• Topological Analysis, Princeton University Press 1958, 1964
• With Edwin Duda: Dynamic Topology, Springer, Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics, 1979