Robert Lee Moore
Robert Lee Moore ( born November 14, 1882 in Dallas, Texas, † October 4, 1974 in Austin, Texas; often cited RL Moore ) was an American mathematician who worked on topology. He is known in the U.S. for its Moore method of teaching math.
Life
Moore, son of a small shopkeeper, who indeed came from New England, but fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, from 1898 studied mathematics at the University of Texas with George Bruce Halsted and Leonard Dickson. After graduating in 1901 he taught at high schools. He solved a problem of Halstead, by showing that one of David Hilbert's axioms of geometry was redundant. Eliakim Hastings Moore (who was not related to him ) from the University of Chicago heard about it and made sure that he could do a doctorate in Chicago in 1905 Oswald Veblen ( Sets of metrical hypotheses for geometry ). After teaching at the University of Tennessee, two years at Princeton University and three years at Northwestern University, where he taught from 1911 to 1916 at the University of Pennsylvania and then from 1916 until his official retirement in 1969 at the University of Texas at Austin, where 1920 he was associate professor and professor in 1923. He built there on his own school of topologists, he taught according to the " Moore method". He was still teaching when he was well over 80 years old ( from 1951 after the retirement age at half pay, 1969, he was finally retiring "forced" ) and had 50 graduate students, including such well-known representative of the geometric topology as RH Bing and Edwin Moise.
At times, his method of teaching mathematics was very influential in the United States. He used as little as possible textbooks and held the lectures is also short, but the students should ( each isolated on its own) to solve the main problems and as far as possible to develop the substance itself ( under the guidance of the teacher who intervened from time to time and also should motivate ). His motto: "That student is taught the best did is taught the least". The method was, for example, also used by Paul Halmos. Halmos reported in his autobiography that a favorite quote of Moore was the Chinese proverb " I hear, I forget. I see, I remember. I do, I understand " (" What I hear I forget, what I see, I remember what I do I understand ").
From 1936 to 1938 he was president of the American Mathematical Society Colloquium Lecturer of which he was in 1929 and their Colloquium Publications he edited from 1929 to 1933. 1973 Moore Hall at the University of Texas at Austin was named after him, where mathematicians, physicists and astronomers are housed. In 1931, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.
He was a racist and refused to teach colored students; ostentatiously he left the hall when a colored mathematician recited.
At the University of Austin Moore (starting in the 1930s ) involved for decades in a feud with the number theorist Harry Vandiver.
Besides the above mentioned RHBing and Edwin Moise are more PhD from him Mary Ellen Rudin, Gordon Thomas Whyburn, Raymond Louis Wilder, Robert Henry Sorgenfrey, RH Anderson, F. Burton Jones and John R. Kline.