I remember Gleason from an incident around 1957 at a party near Harvard when he was trying to show a Radcliffe student how mathematical induction works. As I recall, she didn't get it, even after his careful explanation. Once I tried to explain it to my brother, who's smart but not mathematical. He didn't get it either. Sometimes we math geeks forget that the ideas we deal in are beyond the comprehension of most people. Maybe someday we will be able to spoon out the part of dead geniuses' brains that made them so smart and plop them into other people's skulls. I have a small, benign, unchanging tumor that could be removed to make room, but I'd insist that the transplant raise my IQ by at least 30 points and my knowledge of math by the equivalent of a PhD. - Steve -----Original Message----- From: math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:math-fun-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Dan Asimov Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 7:02 PM To: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Subject: [math-fun] Fw: Andrew Gleason Rich wrote: <<
Whit Diffie passed along the news that Andrew Gleason has died. --Rich
<url is split> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2008/10/20/ andrew_gleason_helped_solve_vexing_geometry_problem/
Here's another one with links: < http://www.math.harvard.edu/history/gleason/index.html >. I think Gleason was most famous for solving (with Deane Montgomery and Leo Zippin) Hilbert's 5th Problem, which asks whether, given a topological manifold M with a topological group structure on it (i.e., the map MxM -> M via (x,y) |-> x/y is continuous), there is always a real analytic atlas on M for which the group operations are real analytic. (At least that's how I remember it.) (Before that, he was a Putnam Fellow three times.) --Dan