Edwin Spanier

Edwin Henry Spaniard ( born August 8, 1921 in Washington, DC; † 11 October 1996 in Scottsdale, Arizona) was an American mathematician who worked among others with algebraic topology.

Life and work

Edwin Spaniards studied at the University of Minnesota (Master 1941) and was - after service in World War II with the U.S. Army Signal Corps - in 1947 received his doctorate in Norman Steenrod (The Cohomology Theory of General Spaces ). 1947/48 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study (as well as 1951 and 1958 /59) and from 1948 at the University of Chicago. 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 by introducing the Kohomotopie groups. During his time in Chicago, he studied with Shiing - Shen Chern, the homology groups of fiber bundles. With JHC Whitehead, he led 1955 ( Duality in homotopy theory, Mathematika 2, 1955, pp. 56-80 ) a named after them duality concept into a homotopy. With JW Alexander, he introduced the Alexander -Spanier cohomology. From the 1960s he busied himself with the theory of formal languages.

Spain is best known as the author of many years the standard work Algebraic Topology, first published by McGraw Hill in 1966.

His doctoral Morris Hirsch heard.

Writings

• Algebraic topology. Corrected reprint, Springer- Verlag, New York / Berlin 1981, ISBN 0-387-90646-0.