Raymond Louis Wilder

Raymond Louis Wilder was an American mathematician, born in Palmer, Massachusetts in 1896, who specialized in topology and gradually acquired philosophical and anthropological interests. He entered Brown University intending to become an actuary, and then did his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, where the influence of Robert Lee Moore led him into pure mathematics and topology. His 1923 thesis, Concerning Continuous Curves, made him the first of Moore many doctoral students. He became an assistant professor at Ohio State University in 1924 and joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1926, where he supervised 26 Ph.D. students, and he retired in 1967.