E. H. Moore

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Eliakim Hastings Moore (January 26 1862, Marietta, Ohio – December 30 1932, Chicago, Illinois) was an American mathematician.

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[edit] Life

Moore, the son of a Methodist minister, discovered mathematics through a summer job at the Cincinnati Observatory while in high school. He learned mathematics at Yale University, where he was a member of Skull & Bones and obtained a B.A. in 1883 and the Ph.D. in 1885 with a thesis, supervised by Hubert Anson Newton, on some work of William Kingdon Clifford and Arthur Cayley. Newton encouraged Moore to study in Germany, and thus he spent an academic year at the University of Berlin, attending lectures by Kronecker and Weierstrass.

On his return to the United States, Moore taught at Yale and at Northwestern University. When the University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892, Moore was the first head of its mathematics department, a position he retained until his 1931 death. His first two colleagues were Bolza and Maschke. The resulting department was arguably the first fully research-oriented mathematics department in American history. Before then, an American had to go to Europe to learn how to do mathematical research.

[edit] Accomplishments

Moore first worked in abstract algebra, proving in 1893 that every finite field is a Galois field. Around 1900, he began working on the foundations of geometry. He reformulated Hilbert's axioms for geometry so that points were the only primitive notion, thus turning Hilbert's primitive lines and planes into defined notions. In 1902, he further showed that some of Hilbert's axioms were redundant. Moore's work on axiom systems is considered one of the starting points for metamathematics and model theory. After 1906, he turned to the foundations of analysis. He also wrote on algebraic geometry, number theory, and integral equations.

At Chicago, Moore supervised 31 doctoral dissertations, including those of George Birkhoff, Leonard Dickson, Robert Lee Moore (no relation), and Oswald Veblen. Birkhoff and Veblen went on to forge and lead the first-rate departments at Harvard and Princeton, respectively. Dickson became the first great American algebraist and number theorist. Robert Moore founded American topology. According to the Mathematical Genealogy Project, E. H. Moore has around 10,000 known "descendants," about as many as Weierstrass, who was 50 years older.

Moore convinced the New York Mathematical Society to change its name to the American Mathematical Society, whose Chicago branch he led. He presided over the AMS, 1901-02, and edited the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 1899-1907. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

[edit] References

  • Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
  • Parshall, K. H., and Rowe, D. E., 1994. The emergence of the American mathematical research community, 1876-1900 : J J Sylvester, Felix Klein, and E H Moore. Providence RI: AMS.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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