E. H. Moore

Eliakim Hastings Moore (1862 to 1932), usually cited as E. H. Moore, was an American mathematician and the first head of the mathematics department at the University of Chicago. The son of a Methodist minister, he studied at Yale, where he took his doctorate in 1885 under Hubert Anson Newton, and spent a year in Berlin attending lectures by Kronecker and Weierstrass. He taught at Yale and Northwestern before leading the Chicago department from its opening in 1892 until his death, building the second research-oriented mathematics department in American history. His early work classified the structure of finite fields in 1893; around 1900 he turned to the foundations of geometry, reformulating Hilbert's axioms with points as the only primitive notion and showing in 1902 that one of Hilbert's axioms was redundant. His work on axiom systems is considered one of the starting points of metamathematics and model theory, and the closure operator first appears in his 1910 work on general analysis. He supervised 31 doctoral dissertations, including those of George Birkhoff, Leonard Dickson, Robert Lee Moore and Oswald Veblen, presided over the American Mathematical Society in 1901 and 1902 and edited its Transactions.