Edwin Spanier

Edwin Henry Spanier was an American mathematician who worked in algebraic topology and wrote one of the standard textbooks in the subject. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1921, graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1941, served three years in the army Signal Corps, and took his doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1947 under Norman Steenrod with a thesis on algebraic topology. After a year at the Institute for Advanced Study he joined the University of Chicago in 1948 and moved to Berkeley in 1959, where he built up a strong group in geometry and topology. His first important paper, in 1949, treated Borsuk's cohomotopy groups. He studied the homology of sphere bundles with Shiing-Shen Chern, introduced duality in homotopy theory with Henry Whitehead, and gave his name to Alexander-Spanier homology. His text Algebraic Topology appeared in 1966, and from about 1961 he also worked on formal languages. He died in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1996.