John Coleman Moore

John Coleman Moore (1923 to 2016) was an American mathematician and one of the most influential topologists and homological algebraists of the later twentieth century. Born in Staten Island, New York, he served in the Army in Europe in the Second World War, took his bachelor's degree at MIT in 1948 and his Ph.D. at Brown University in 1952 under George W. Whitehead. He joined the Princeton mathematics department in 1952 and retired in 1989, then took part in the life of the University of Rochester department. His thesis approach to spectral sequences, the Moore spaces, the Moore path space, the Bockstein spectral sequence, the treatise on Hopf algebras with John Milnor and the Eilenberg-Moore spectral sequence all carry his mark, and Borel-Moore homology is also named after him. He supervised 24 Ph.D. students at Princeton, among them William Browder and Peter May.