Person: Moore (2), Eliakim
Eliakim Moore was an American mathematician who worked on abstract algebra, algebraic geometry, number theory and integral equations.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- One summer he worked as an assistant to Ormond Stone, who was the director of the Cincinnati Observatory, and from this time on Eliakim knew that he wanted to study mathematics and astronomy at university.
- In 1879 Moore entered Yale University and took, as he had planned, courses in mathematics and astronomy.
- Moore's doctoral dissertation was entitled Extensions of Certain Theorems of Clifford and Cayley in the Geometry of n Dimensions and this led to the award of his doctorate in 1885.
- Newton encouraged Moore to go to Europe for a year and helped to finance the trip.
- Moore spent the year in Germany, going first to Göttingen where he spent the summer of 1885 studying the German language, but spending most of the academic year 1885-86 attending lectures by Kronecker and Weierstrass at the University of Berlin.
- It is worth adding that American academics were really forced to train in Europe in Moore's day but when six years later he set up his research school in Chicago it provided for the first time the opportunity for American mathematicians to train in a research-intensive environment in the United States.
- On his return to the United States, Moore was appointed as an instructor at Northwestern University for the year 1886-87, then he spent two years as a mathematics tutor at Yale before spending the years 1889 to 1892 back at Northwestern University.
- During this second spell at Northwestern Moore was approached by William Rainey Harper and offered a post at Chautauqua in New York.
- Moore refused, knowing that this would mean taking up a post which involved a lot of low level teaching, while he wanted to concentrate on a research.
- Now he could offer Moore the post he wanted to satisfy his research ambitions and Moore quickly accepted.
- Moore was appointed professor and acting head of the mathematics department at Chicago when the university first opened in 1892.
- The Moores had two sons, only one of whom reached adulthood.
- In 1896 Moore became head of the mathematics department at Chicago, a post he retained until 1931.
- When he was appointed at Chicago, Moore persuaded the university authorities to appoint two young German mathematicians Bolza and Maschke to his department.
- Moore was a fiery enthusiast, brilliant, and keenly interested in the popular mathematical research movements of the day; Bolza, a product of the meticulous German school of analysis led by Weierstrass, was an able, and widely read research scholar; Maschke was more deliberate than the other two, sagacious, brilliant in research, and a most delightful lecturer in geometry.
- Among Moore's Ph.D. students at Chicago were Dickson, Veblen, Anna Pell Wheeler and G D Birkhoff.
- Although Robert Moore had Veblen as his supervisor in Chicago he worked with, and was strongly influenced by, Eliakim Moore.
- Moore's first main areas of research, which he studied from about 1892 to 1900, were algebra and groups where he proved in 1893 that every finite field is a Galois field.
- In his work on the foundations of geometry begun around 1900 Moore examined the independence of Hilbert's axioms.
- Moore was a man of high intellectual and academic standards; he expected much from himself, his students, and his colleagues.
- Throughout his work in general analysis, Moore stressed fundamentals, as he sought to strengthen the foundations of mathematics.
- Moore brought precision and rigour to all the fields he studied.
- In 1893 Moore was one of the main organisers of the first international mathematical congress to be held in the United States.
- Setting up a Chicago branch of the Society, which he led, Moore helped in the having the Society reach across the United States.
- Moore received many honours from around the world for his contributions.
Born 26 January 1862, Marietta, Ohio, USA. Died 30 December 1932, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
