Person: Wilder, Raymond Louis
Raymond Wilder was an American mathematician who worked in topology as well as producing works on philosophy.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Wilder then taught mathematics at Brown during 1920-21 while studying for his master's degree in actuarial mathematics which he received in 1921.
- Wilder moved to the University of Texas in 1921 where again he was appointed as an instructor while he worked for his doctorate.
- After Wilder persuaded Moore to let him take the course, Moore proceeded to ignore him until he solved one of the hardest problems Moore posed to the class.
- Wilder gave up his plans to study actuarial mathematics and became Moore's research student.
- He suggested Wilder write up the solution to the problem for his doctorate which indeed he did, becoming Moore's first Texas doctorate in 1923 with his dissertation Concerning Continuous Curves.
- Wilder's thesis contained a new approach to the Schönflies programme.
- He continued to undertake research with this aim and in 1930, in A converse of the Jordan-Brouwer separation theorem in three dimensions, Wilder showed that a subset of Euclidean 3-space whose complementary domains satisfied certain homology conditions was a 2-sphere.
- Wilder's hostility to mindless patriotism and his predilection for liberal thought accompanied him throughout his life.
- The initial phase of Wilder's research on the Schönflies programme, which we described above, was in in set-theoretic topology and lasted until around 1930.
- The final three chapters of the book discuss Wilder's contributions in the theory of positional topological invariants.
- It was around the time that Wilder published the first edition of Topology of Manifolds that his research interests underwent a major change.
- Wilder's ideas continued to develop along the lines of cultural anthropology.
- In 1981 Wilder published another major text Mathematics as a cultural system which has a similar title to the talk he gave to the International Congress of Mathematicians thirty years earlier.
- After Wilder retired from the University of Michigan in 1967 he moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara.
- Wilder contributed much to American mathematics.
- Wilder played a major role in the Mathematical Association of America being its president during 1965-66.
Born 3 November 1896, Palmer, Massachusetts, USA. Died 7 July 1982, Santa Barbara, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Usa, Topology
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
