Robert Lee Moore
| Robert Lee Moore | |
|---|---|
R. L. Moore (1882–1974)
|
|
| Born |
November 14, 1882 Dallas, Texas |
| Died | October 4, 1974 (aged 91) Austin, Texas |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | University of Texas at Austin |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1905) |
| Thesis | Sets of Metrical Hypotheses for Geometry (1905) |
| Doctoral advisor |
Oswald Veblen E. H. Moore |
| Doctoral students |
Richard Anderson R. H. Bing Sherman Dyer F. Burton Jones John Kline Edwin E Moise Anna Mullikin Mary Ellen Rudin Gordon Whyburn Raymond Wilder |
Robert Lee Moore (November 14, 1882 – October 4, 1974) was an American mathematician, known for his work in general topology and the Moore method of teaching university mathematics.
Although Moore's father was reared in New England and was of New England ancestry, he fought in the American Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. After the war, he ran a hardware store in Dallas, then little more than a railway stop, and raised six children, of whom Robert, named after the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, was the fifth.
Moore entered the University of Texas at the unusually youthful age of 15, in 1898, already knowing calculus thanks to self-study. He completed the B.Sc. in three years instead of the usual four; his teachers included G. B. Halsted and L. E. Dickson. After a year as a teaching fellow at Texas, he taught high school for a year in Marshall, Texas.
An assignment of Halsted's led Moore to prove that one of Hilbert's axioms for geometry was redundant. When E. H. Moore (no relation), who headed the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago, and whose research interests were on the foundations of geometry, heard of Robert's feat, he arranged for a scholarship that would allow Robert to study for a doctorate at Chicago. Oswald Veblen supervised Moore's 1905 thesis, titled Sets of Metrical Hypotheses for Geometry.
Moore then taught one year at the University of Tennessee, two years at Princeton University, and three years at Northwestern University. In 1910, he married Margaret MacLelland Key of Brenham, Texas; they had no children. In 1911, he took up a position at the University of Pennsylvania.
...
Wikipedia