Description
Book SynopsisHassler Whitney was a giant of twentieth-century mathematics. This biography paints a picture of him and includes dozens of revealing anecdotes. Mathematically, he had a rare detector that went off whenever he spotted a piece of mathematical gold, and he would then draw countless pictures, gradually forging a path from hunch to proof.
Table of Contents
- Permissions
- Some snapshots
- How Hassler chose his genes
- Growing up
- Hassler goes to college
- Early days at Harvard
- The four-color problem: Some history and Whitney's contributions to it
- Whitney and the four-color problem: A closer look
- Whitney discovers a big brother to the matrix: The matroid
- Topology: Its beginnings
- Topology grows into a branch of mathematics
- Whitney helped revolutionize algebraic topology
- Whitney's extension theorems
- Whitney's weak embedding theorem
- Whitney's strong embedding theorem
- World War II
- From Harvard to the Institute, and insights on smooth mappings
- Are there decomposition theorems for nonmanifolds?
- After research
- Evolution or revolution?
- Other happenings at the Institute
- The unspeakable was about to happen
- Sometimes you get to know people through the little things
- Parting shots: A gallery of photos
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index.
