John Hadley

Born: 16 April 1682 in Bloomsbury, London, England Died: 14 Feb 1744 in East Barnet, Hertfordshire, England

John Hadley's mother was Katherine Fitzjames and his father was George Hadley. Both parents were from leading families, with his father having an estate at Enfield Chase near East Barnet, Hertfordshire which is now in London. George Hadley became high sheriff of Hertfordshire when John was nine years old. John was the second of his parents' six children having an older sister and two younger brothers George and Henry. John was five years older than Henry and three years older than George. No records survive to show how and where he was educated but certainly he must have acquired a high level of expertise in mechanics, and optics as well as mathematics. Hadley was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 21 March 1717 and he attained high office in the Society when he was elected Vice President on 12 February 1728. Although he had no need to earn a living, he did devote considerable time to looking after the family estates and also served the local community as governor of Barnet grammar school from 1720. His father died in 1729 and, as the eldest son, Hadley inherited the estate near East Barnet as well as other land owned by the family. This certainly put in in an exceptionally good financial position and enabled him to pursue his scientific

interests. On 6 June 1734 he married Elizabeth Hodges who herself was wealthy. They had one child, a son John born in 1738. We have indicated above that Hadley had a financial position which enabled him to devote both time and money to science. We must now look at his achievements in this area. He built, in collaboration with his brothers George and Henry, the first effective Newtonian reflecting telescope during the years 1719 to 1720. It had a 6 inch mirror and proved a very useful instrument. It was tested by Hadley and also by Halley, the astronomer royal, in 1721 and Halley reported to the Royal Society (see for example [2]) that the telescope:... shows the limbs of the planets with a greater degree of distinctness than other sort of telescopes do, in which particular ... it excels even the great telescope at Wanstead. Bradley also tested the telescope, comparing it with the refractor at Wanstead, and found it an excellent instrument which produced as good results as much larger refracting telescopes which, because of their size, were much more unwieldy to use. He built a Gregorian reflector in 1726. It was due to him that reflecting telescopes of sufficient accuracy and power to be useful in astronomy were developed. At this time one of the major problems which many scientists attacked was that of determining longitude at sea. The shipwreck of the fleet under the command of Sir Cloudesley Shovell on the Scilly Islands in 1707 led to Parliament putting up a large amount of money for any method to find longitude at sea to within one degree. This motivated Hadley to tackle the problem and in 1730 he invented the reflecting octant which measured the altitude of the sun or of a star. The construction of the octant was, as his telescope had been, undertaken jointly by Hadley together with his brothers George and Henry. In 1731 Hadley showed his new quadrant to the Royal Society and published a description in his paper Description of a new instrument for taking angles which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Hadley wrote in the paper:The instrument is designed to be of use where the motion of the objects, or any circumstance occasioning unsteadiness in the common Instruments renders the observations difficult or uncertain. In 1734 he showed a new version of the instrument, with an added bubble-level, to the Royal Society. It was used to determine position at sea. Edmund Stone wrote:-

Mr. Hadley tells us, that upon trial of one of these instruments, three observations made at sea of the distance between two stars with a brass octant of this kind differed from Mr. Flamsteed's at land, only about a minute. Hadley published A description of a new instrument for taking the latitude or other altitude at sea (1734). His design evolved into that of a sextant. A magnifying glass was added to read the scale; a telescopic sight was added with cross-wires to divide the field of view. The arc was extended from an octant to a sextant and a stout handle was added at the back of the instrument.

Frederick Valentine Atkinson

Born: 25 Jan 1916 in Pinner, Middlesex, England Died: 13 Nov 2002 in Toronto, Canada

Frederick Atkinson was known as Derick from the time he was young. His father was George Arthur Atkinson, a journalist and film critic on the Daily Telegraph, and his mother was Dorothy Boxer. Dorothy was George Atkinson's second wife and they had two children with Derick having a sister Anne four years his junior. Derick entered Reddiford School in Pinner in 1922, then later he attended Alleyn's School. His parents moved to Dulwick and, in 1929 Derick was attending Dulwich College Preparatory School. At this time his ability in mathematics became evident and he topped his class in geometry, algebra, and arithmetic. His parents, however, did not see their son as a future mathematician, rather his father wanted him to enter the diplomatic service while his mother hoped that her son would enter the Church. In the summer of 1929 Atkinson was accepted into St Paul's School in West Kensington. It was a famous school with an outstanding reputation and Atkinson flourished as a mathematician there. He received the highest praise for his mathematical achievements and the only note of criticism was the fear that he would concentrate too much on mathematics. He was elected to a Senior Foundation Scholarship in 1932 and, after

sitting the Mathematical Scholarship Examinations at Queen's College, Oxford, in 1933 he was awarded an open scholarship and matriculated at the College in 1934. During his undergraduate years he shared a room for part of the time with J L B Cooper. The two became life-long friends. Atkinson graduated B.A. with First Class Honours in Mathematics in 1937. He continued to study at Oxford working on his doctoral thesis advised by Titchmarsh. He submitted his thesis Mean Value Theorems for the Riemann Zeta Function in 1939 and, after being examined by Hardy, Littlewood and Titchmarsh, he was awarded his doctorate. He was then appointed to a Junior Research Fellow position at Magdelen College. World War II broke out around the time that Atkinson took up his fellowship. He resigned the fellowship in October 1940 so that he might undertake war work with the Intelligence Corps. Atkinson was interested in languages and spoke Urdu, German, Hungarian and Russian. He also was proficient in Latin and Ancient Greek, and had some knowledge of French, Italian, and Spanish. He began visiting Ladislav and Agnes Haas, whose first language was Hungarian and had recently arrived from Czechoslovakia, in order to practice speaking Hungarian and Russian with them. Ladislav and Agnes had two daughters and, after a couple of years, Atkinson proposed to Dusja Haas. They were married in 1943 and had three children, Stephen, Vivienne and Leslie. Rooney writes in: One of Dusja's favourite stories is that Derick proposed to her in Hungarian, their only common language, and her reaction was: He doesn't know what he is saying! Atkinson was in the Intelligence Corps from 1940 to 1946. Part of this time he spent at Bletchley Park involved in code breaking, but for around three years he was in India breaking Japanese codes. After his war service came to an end he returned to Oxford where he taught for two years as a lecturer in Christ Church. In 1948, shortly after he was reappointed for a further two years at Oxford, he was offered the chair of mathematics at University College, Ibadan, Nigeria. Atkinson resigned his Oxford post and accepted the professorship in Ibadan. His letter of appointment states: Your duties will initially be to develop your department as a centre of teaching and research. Atkinson held the chair at Ibadan for seven years before moving to Australia in 1956 to Canberra College. Four years later he moved to Canada to take up a professorship at the University of Toronto. He held this position from 1960 until he retired in 1981. For the final six years of this period he was Chairman of the Department of Mathematics. We noted above that Atkinson's doctoral dissertation was on the Riemann zeta function. In fact much of his early research followed on from this beginning with papers such as A

summation formula for p(n), the partition function (1939), The mean value of the zetafunction on the critical line (1941), A divisor problem (1941), The Abel summation of certain Dirichlet series (1948), A mean value property of the Riemann zetafunction (1948), The mean-values of arithmetical functions (1949), and The mean-value of the Riemann zeta function (1949). The most important of these early results was probably the last of these papers in which he found the second term in the asymptotic expansion of the mean square average of the zeta function on the critical line. A new phase of his work began when he began to study eigene function expansions both for difference equations and differential equations. He published the important book Discrete and continuous boundary problems in 1964. He wrote in the Preface:The essential unity of our subject has not always been apparent; the wealth of its applications and interpretations are perhaps responsible for this. ... We shall pursue our task from three directions. We shall present the theory of certain recurrence relations in the spirit of the theory of boundary problems for differential equations. Second, we shall present the theory of boundary problems for certain ordinary differential equations, emphasizing cases in which the coefficients may be discontinuous, or may have singularities of delta function type. Finally, we give some account of theories which unify the topics of differential and difference equations, relying mainly on the method of replacement by integral equations. In 1972 he published another important book: Multiparameter eigenvalue problems. Patrick J Browne gives high praise to the work which, he writes, is: ... an invaluable and indispensable introduction to the subject. The author's tidy but nonethe-less flowing style is complemented by sound and clear exposition throughout. Rooney describes Atkinson's personality:In personality, Derick seemed a very quiet man, but a little probing revealed immense depth, perspicacity and ability. He also describes his hobbies:Derick's main hobby was music, for he was a fine pianist and a near professional quality player of the piano accordion. Indeed, while in Nigeria, Derick organized and played in a dance orchestra at faculty dances. Another enjoyment for him was giving parties, ably complemented by Dusja, who is a masterly cook. ... Other interests included gardening and carpentry; when Derick began to run out of space for books in his house, he lined the basement with bookshelves constructed by himself.

Atkinson received many honours for his contributions including election to fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (1967), election to fellowship in the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1975), and the McDougall- Brisbane Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for 1974-76 for his paper Limit-n criteria of integral type (1974). He served as nineteenth president of the Canadian Mathematical Societyduring 1989-91. He also received the Humboldt Prize of the German Government in 1992. In August 1992, after returning from Europe where he was presented with the Humboldt Prize, Atkinson suffered a massive stroke. He survived for a further ten years during which time he could not speak and he was partly paralysed. His wife Dusja cared for him throughout this long and difficult final illness.

Leone Battista Alberti

Born: 18 Feb 1404 in Genoa, French Empire (now Italy) Died: 3 April 1472 in Rome, Papal States (now Italy)

Leone Battista Alberti's father was Lorenzo Alberti. We do not know who his mother was, and there is reason to believe that he was an illegitimate child. His father's family were wealthy and had been involved in banking and commercial business in Florence during the 14th century. In fact the success of the city of Florence during this period is to a large extent a consequence of the success of the Alberti family, whose firm had branches spread widely through north Italy. Not content with their major financial achievements, however, members of the family became involved in politics. This turned out to be a disaster and the family was driven out of Florence after decrees were passed to exile them. It was for this reason that Lorenzo Alberti came to be living in Genoa at the time his son was born, for there he was safe yet still able to continue his wealthy life style within a local branch of the family firm. As a child Leone Battista received his mathematical education from his father Lorenzo. However, when the plague struck Genoa, Lorenzo rapidly went with his children to Venice where the firm also had a major branch run by members of the Alberti family. However, Lorenzo died shortly after arriving in Venice and Leone Battista began living

with one of his uncles. This arrangement was short-lived for the uncle soon vanished. It is likely that by this time members of the family were attempting by unscrupulous means to gain access to the family fortune. Leone Battista attended a school in Padua then, from 1421, he attended the University of Bologna where he studied law but did not enjoy this topic. He became ill through overwork but still managed to gain a degree in canon law. It was around this time that he became interested in pursuing his mathematical studies, rather as a way to relax when stressed out by his law studies which he found made far too large demands on memory. Also around this time he wrote a comedyPhilodoxius (Lover of Glory, 1424), composed in Latin verse. By this time the decrees which had forced his family to flee from Florence had been revoked and Alberti went to live in the city where he met Brunelleschi and the two became good friends. They shared an interest in mathematics and, through Brunelleschi, Alberti became interested in architecture. At this stage, however, his interest was purely theoretical and he did not put his theories into practice. In 1430 Alberti began working for a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. This post meant that he travelled a lot, in particular to France, Belgium and Germany. In 1432 he began following a literary career as a secretary in the Papal Chancery in Rome writing biographies of the saints in elegant Latin. Going to Rome was highly significant for Alberti, for there he fell in love with the ancient classical architecture which he saw all around. This led him to study not only classical architecture but also painting and sculpture. Alberti served Pope Eugene IV but this was a period of considerable weakness for the Papacy and military action against the Pope forced Eugene IV out of Rome on several occasions. Alberti left Rome with the Pope at such times and spent time at the court in Rimini. Nicholas V, who was Pope from 1447 to 1455, was an enthusiast for classical studies and produced an environment much suited to Alberti who presented him with his book on architecture De re aedificatoria in 1452. Alberti modelled the book on the classical work by Vitruvius and copied his format by dividing his text into ten books. Vitruvius (1st century BC) was the author of the famous treatise De architectura (On Architecture). The methods of fortification which Alberti set out in the text were highly influential and were used in the fortification of towns for several hundred years. In 1447, the year Nicholas V became Pope, Alberti became a canon of the Metropolitan Church of Florence and Abbot of Sant' Eremita of Pisa. Pope Nicholas V employed him on a number of major architectural projects and we describe below some of his remarkable buildings. Alberti studied the representation of 3-dimensional objects and, in 1435, wrote the first general treatise De Pictura on the laws of perspective. This was first published in Latin but in the following year Alberti published an Italian version under the title Della pittura. The book was dedicated to Brunelleschi who had indeed been a great inspiration to him. It was printed in 1511. Simon writes in [13]:-

Alberti explained and justified his method of perspective construction by using the metaphor of a window opening onto the world. The picture surface is conceived as intersecting the pyramid of vision without altering it. Alberti wrote about how he enjoyed applying mathematics to artistic undertakings:Nothing pleases me so much as mathematical investigations and demonstrations, especially when I can turn them to some useful practice drawing from mathematics the principles of painting perspective and some amazing propositions on the moving of weights . Field [9] also comments on how mathematics influenced the arts through the contributons of Alberti and others around the same period:What we seem to be seeing in this progress of perspective towards the applied arts in the sixteenth century is the progress of mathematics as an increasingly important component in the training and practice of craftsmen in general, and of architects in particular. Alberti also worked on maps (again involving his skill at geometrical mappings) and he collaborated with Paolo Toscanelli who supplied Columbus with the maps for his first voyage. He also wrote the first book on cryptography which contains the first example of a frequency table. In this area he introduced polyalphabetic substitution [10]. This is the method of cipher in which the kth letter of a text which is theith letter in the alphabet is replaced by the jth letter of the alphabet where j = f (i, k) for some function f. Polyalphabetic substitution was introduced into diplomatic practice by Alberti, who also invented a simple mechanical device to speed up coding and decoding, consisting of a fixed and a movable ring. Alberti is best known, however, as an architect. We mentioned above that Alberti spent time in Rimini and it was there that he designed the facade of the Tempio Malatestiano, his first attempt to put his theoretical ideas about architecture into practice. It was designed in the style of the Arch of Augustus in Rimini and is the first example in the history of art of a classical building becoming the model for a Renaissance one. Gombrich writes: Brunelleschi's idea had been to introduce the forms of classical buildings, the columns, pediments and cornices which he had copied from Roman ruins. He had used these forms in his churches. His successors were eager to emulate him in this. [The Church of S Andrea, Mantua, is] a church planned by the Florentine architect Leone Battista Alberti, who conceived its facade as a gigantic triumphal arch in the Roman manner. But how was this

new programme to be applied to an ordinary dwelling-house in a city street? No private houses had survived from Roman times, and even if they had, needs and customs had changed so much that they might have offered little guidance. The problem, then, was to find a compromise between the traditional house, with walls and windows, and the classical forms which Brunelleschi had taught the architects to use. It was again Alberti who found the solution that remained influential up to our own days. When he built a palace for the rich Florentine merchant family Rucellai, he designed an ordinary threestoreyed building. There is little similarity between this facade and a classical ruin. And yet Alberti stuck to Brunelleschi's programme and used classical forms for the decoration of the facade. Instead of building columns or half-columns, he covered the house with a network of flat pilasters and entablatures which suggest a classical order without changing the structure of the building. ... Alberti ... merely 'translated' a Gothic design into classical forms by smoothing out the 'barbaric' pointed arch and using the elements of the classical order in a traditional context. The Church of S Andrea, Mantua, which Gombrich comments on in the above quote, was designed by Alberti in 1470 and work on it began two years later. Alberti did not live to see his design take shape for he died in the year in which building started and by the time the facade and portico were in position he had been dead for 18 years. The church is discussed in [5] where the author writes that Alberti's:... avowed architectural aim, to schematise in the spatial form of the church the immanent, harmonious order of the world, found majestic realization in [his] own church of Sant' Andrea in Mantua. This was his final architectural work ... and it carries out these theoretical ideas with perfect artistic clarity. Alberti made numerous innovations in his design with the traditional division into nave and aisles discarded in favour of providing a continuous space. There is certainly a mathematical flavour to the way that Alberti has sequences of small and large chapels alternating along the sides of the main space. In addition to the Church of S Andrea, Mantua, Alberti had earlier articulated the facade of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which he began work on in 1447, and the Palazzo Rucellai, mentioned in the quote of Gombrich above. Both works were undertaken for the Florence merchant Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai. The Palazzo Rucellai was designed between 1446 and 1451 and stands in the Via della Vigna. In the square, on the right, is the Loggia dei Rucellai built by Alberti in 1460 as a formal hall for the Rucellai family. As to Alberti's character and appearance, Gille writes in:

Alberti was, we are told, amiable, very handsome, and witty. He was adept at directing discussions and took pleasure in organising small conversational groups. In fact Alberti wrote some autobiographical notes which survive in which he boasts of his physical abilities. He claimed he was capable of:... standing with his feet together, and springing over a man's head. In a similar vein he also claimed that he:... excelled in all bodily exercises; could, with feet tied, leap over a standing man; could in the great cathedral, throw a coin far up to ring against the vault; amused himself by taming wild horses and climbing mountains. Even if untrue, these delightful quotes tell us much of Alberti's personality.

Charles Terence Clegg Wall

Born: 14 Dec 1936 in Bristol, England

Terry Wall's father Charles Wall was a schoolteacher. Terry Wall attended Marlborough College. He then entered Trinity College, Cambridge from where he was awarded a B.A. and, in 1960, a Ph.D. for his thesis Algebraic Aspects of Cobordism. His thesis advisors at Cambridge were Chris Zeeman and Frank Adams. On 22 August 1959 he married Alexandra Joy (Sandra) Hearnshaw; they had four children, Nicholas (born 1962), Catherine (born 1963), Lucy (born 1965), and Alexander ( born 1967). Wall had already been awarded a fellowship at Trinity College in 1959 before the award of his doctorate and he held this fellowship until 1964. He did not remain in Cambridge for all of this period, for instance he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship which allowed him to spend the academic year 1960-61 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In addition to his fellowship, Wall was appointed a College Lecturer at Cambridge when he returned from the United States in 1961. In 1964 Wall moved from Cambridge to Oxford where he was appointed Reader in Mathematics and a fellow of St Catherine's College. After a year he was appointed to the chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Liverpool, taking up the professorship in

Liverpool in 1965. During 1967 was a Royal Society Leverhulme visiting professor in Mexico. A SERC senior research fellowship from 1983 to 1988 enabled him to concentrate on research over this period. Wall's research is mostly in the area of geometric topology and related algebra. In particular he has made substantial contributions to the study of singularities, especially isolated singularities, of differentiable maps and algebraic varieties. He has written a number of highly influential books including Surgery on compact manifolds (1970) and A geometric introduction to topology (1972). This latter work is an introduction to algebraic topology for a reader without background in general topology. The book builds up to a proof of the Alexander duality theorem in the plane; a result which generalises the Jordan curve theorem. In 1995 Wall published The geometry of topological stability written jointly with A A du Plessis. His current research continues the studies of applications of techniques developed in this book which is having spin-offs to results about hypersurfaces in projective space. To date he has published over 160 research articles on mathematical topics. Wall's work has led to him receiving many awards. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1969 and the Royal Society has honoured him further with the award of its Sylvester Medal in 1988. He was a member of the Council of the Royal Society from 1974 to 1976. He has served the London Mathematical Society in many ways over a large number of years being on the Council from 1972 to 1980 and then for a second spell from 1992 to 1996. He served as the 59thPresident of the London Mathematical Society from 1978-80. The Society has made him a number of awards to mark his fine mathematical achievements, including the award of their Junior Berwick Prize, their Whitehead Prize in 1976 and their Plya Prize in 1988. The Whitehead Prize and the Plya Prize were awarded for his work on surgery on manifolds and L-theory. In 1990 Wall was elected a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. In 2000 he was elected an honorary member of the Irish Mathematical Society. Wall retired in 1999 and was made Emeritus Professor at the University of Liverpool. At the same time he was appointed Senior Fellow at the University of Liverpool, a position he held until 2003. Retirement certainly did not mean that Wall was less in demand as a plenary speaker at international conferences. He was a main speaker at the conference 'Singularity theory' held in Sao Carlos, Brazil in 1994 and was then asked again to be a main speaker at this 'Singularity theory' conference in 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2008. He

was also a main speaker at the 'Singularity theory' conference held in Sapporo, Japan in 2003. Wall continues to publish important research articles, and an outstanding book Singular points of plane curves in 2004. Ccero Fernandes de Carvalho writes in a review:Although important results about singularities of algebraic curves may be traced back to Newton, this field's more steady development only gained momentum in the late nineteenth century, with the results of Max Noether on the resolution of singularities. A short time after that, another important contribution appeared in the work of Karl Brauner on the fundamental group of the complement of a link in the 3-sphere, in the beginning of the twentieth century. From then on, a growing interplay between the fields of topology and algebra contributed to a deeper understanding of singularities. This interaction, and many of its results, are fully exposed and explained in the book under review. ... In this reviewer's belief this is an excellent textbook for a graduate course on singularities of plane curves, and certainly is another most valuable contribution from the author. Outside mathematics Wall has many interests including home wine making, reading, gardening, walking and an interest in politics which has seen him as treasurer of the Wirral Area SDP from 1985 to 1988. He then became a member of the Wirral West Liberal Democrat Party. From 1987 he has been a Governor of West Kirby Grammar School for girls, and from 2000 he has been Treasurer of Hoylake Chamber Concert Society.

Martin Eichler

Born: 29 March 1912 in Pinnow, Germany Died: 7 Oct 1992 in Basel, Switzerland

Martin Eichler's father was a minister in the Church. Martin's parents gave him his early education before he entered the Gymnasium in Gtersloh in 1923. He studied there for seven years, graduating in 1930. He then entered the University of Knigsberg in 1930 where he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry. After going to Zurich to continue his studies, he then went to the University of Halle-Wittenberg where he wrote his thesis Untersuchungen in der Zahlentheorie der rationalen Quaternionenalgebren with Heinrich Brandt as his advisor. Eichler was awarded his doctorate in 1936. Following the award of his doctorate, Eichler was appointed as an assistant in the Mathematical Seminar at the University of Halle. However, by this time the Nazis were in power in Germany. Eichler was dismissed from his assistantship for political reasons but fortunately Hasse found him a temporary position as an editor for a new version of the Enzyklopdie der Mathematischen Wissenschaften. After Eichler worked on this for a while, Hasse managed to arrange a position for him as an assistant at Gttingen. In 1939 he submitted his habilitation thesis to Gttingen and qualified to lecturer there.

It now appeared that, after a difficult period, Eichler's mathematical career was back on track thanks mainly to the efforts of Hasse. However World War II again caused an interruption to his career. Eichler was sent to Peenemnde to work at the Heeresversuchsanstalt, an extensive rocket development and test site which had been set up in 1937. The team at Peenemnde, led by Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, was involved in much more than rocket development. Radar was developed there as was the first closed circuit television system. During this period Eichler also worked at the Technical University of Darmstadt. After the war ended Eichler was eventually able to return to his university position as Gttingen which he did in 1947. He then went to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough in England where he spent two years returning to Germany in 1949. He was appointed as an extraordinary professor at the University of Munster where he remained until 1956 when he went to the University of Marburg as an ordinary professor. Two years later he was invited to Basel to succeed Ostrowski who had retired in 1959 after holding the chair at Basel for over 30 years. Eichler wrote Alexander Ostrowski. ber sein Leben und Werk a fine tribute to Ostrowski in 1988. He married Erika Paffen; they had two children. Eichler's early papers include ber die Einheiten der Divisionsalgebren (1937), Einheitentheorie der einfachen Algebren (1938), ber die Idealklassenzahl total definiter Quaternionenalgebren(1938). Slightly later he wrote a number of papers on the theory of quadratic forms such as ber gewisse Anzahlformeln in der Theorie der quadratischen Formen (1943), Zur Theorie der quadratischen Formen gerader Variablenzahl (1945) and Zahlentheore der quadratischen Formen (1946). In 1952 he published the book Quadratische Formen und orthogonale Gruppen. B W Jones writes:The aim of the author is to develop in this book a thoroughgoing, self-contained theory of quadratic forms from a completely modern point of view. ... The quadratic forms are considered as metrics of a vector space in an arbitrary field and associated with such a metric is the orthogonal group in the broad sense of an automorphic transformation of the form. ... the spirit of the work of Hasse, Hecke, and Siegel pervade this volume and the power and beauty of the general modern methods is evident throughout. Later books by Eichler include: Einfhrung in die Theorie der algebraischen Zahlen und Funktionen (1963) translated into English as Introduction to the theory of algebraic numbers and functions(1966); Projective varieties and modular forms (1971); and (coauthored with Don Zagier) The theory of Jacobi forms (1985). The first of these is described in a review by A Mattuck which begins as follows:-

Three books peacefully coexist between the covers of this work: one on algebraic functions of one variable, an introduction to algebraic number theory, and an exposition of modular forms with some applications to analytic number theory. Their association is rather loose, and occasionally a turn of the page means not only a change of scene but a new cast of characters as well. However, the modular forms gain by being placed in the context of algebraic function theory and serve to illustrate it as well, while the elementary substratum common to algebraic numbers and functions is well known. A review of The theory of Jacobi forms pays it this fine compliment:... the material is of such intrinsic beauty and importance that no serious student of arithmetic should miss this book.

Charles Ehresmann

Born: 19 April 1905 in Strasbourg, France Died: 22 Sept 1979 in Amiens France

Charles Ehresmann came from a poor family in Alsace. His father was a gardener and the family spoke Alsatian which is related to the Germanic languages. Alsace, which was originally French, had came under German rule in 1871 but by 1902 had effective selfgovernment. After 1911 it had its own constitution and progress was made toward Germanisation in the region. Certainly Charles began his schooling entirely in German up to the end of World War I in 1918. He attended the Lyce Klber in Strasbourg but, after 1919 Alsace was returned to France and French language schools were set up. This met with resistance from the German speaking population but their attempts at autonomy within the French Republic were unsuccessful. Charles, however, was from that time on taught in French. In 1924 Ehresmann entered the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris. He graduated in 1927, spent a year doing military service, then taught mathematics at the French speaking Lyce in Rabat, the national capital of Morocco. After spending the years 192829 in Rabat, Ehresmann continued his education going to Gttingen to undertake research. During his time in Gttingen in the years 1930 and 1931 it was the leading

centre for mathematical research in the world although, of course, shortly after this the rise to power of the Nazis would change the mathematical world significantly. From 1932 to 1934 Ehresmann studied at Princeton in the United States. Having left the leading centre of Gttingen, he had gone to the place which in many ways would replace it as the leading mathematical centre as the Jewish mathematicians left Germany after the Nazis passed their anti-Jewish legislation in 1933. Ehresmann's doctorate was awarded by Paris in 1934. In his doctoral dissertation, and during the time from 1934 to 1939 when he was carrying out research in the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, he studied topological properties of differential manifolds. In particular he described [1]:... the homology of classical types of homogeneous manifolds, such as Grassmannians, flag manifolds, Stiefel manifolds, and classical groups. He became a lecturer in the University of Strasbourg in 1939 but shortly after this he was back in the middle of the France/Germany conflict of his youth but this time on a quite different scale as the Germans invaded Alsace in 1940. During the German occupation of World War II, the University of Strasbourg's faculties were moved to Clermont Ferrand University in central France, then back to Strasbourg in 1945. Ehresmann followed the moves of the university then, in 1955, a chair of topology was specially created for him in the University of Paris. He held this chair until he retired in 1975. Although he was 70 years old when he retired, Ehresmann did not give up lecturing for at this time he moved to Amiens, where his second wife was a professor of mathematics, and he taught there. Ehresmann was one of the creators of differential topology. Beginning in 1941, Ehresmann made major contributions toward establishing the current view of fibre spaces, manifolds, foliations and jets. His work in the creation and development of fibre spaces followed on from the study of a special case made earlier by Seifert and Whitney. After 1957 Ehresmann became a leader in category theory and he worked in this area for 20 years. His principal achievements in this area concern local categories and structures defined by atlases, and germs of categories. The article [3] contains a list of 139 articles written by Ehresmann during his productive career as well as listing several volumes which he edited.

Between 1980 and 1983 Andre Charles Ehresmann, his wife, edited his complete works. These appeared in seven volumes: Charles Ehresmann: Oeuvres compltes et commentes as supplements to the Journal Cahiers de Topologie et Gometrie Diffrentielle Categoriques which Charles Ehresmann created in 1957. In [1] Dieudonn describes Ehresmann's personality as:... distinguished by forthrightness, simplicity, and total absence of conceit or careerism. As a teacher he was outstanding, not so much for the brilliance of his lectures as for the inspiration and tireless guidance he generously gave to his research students ...