Carnegie Library Centennial Celebration
1907 - 2007
The History of the Math Department as given on its website.
A Talk by Philip T. Church
October 4, 2007
I will briefly outline the contents of the Math Dept website on its history and biographies, on math.syr.edu. First, I should credit Patricia O’Malley for her excellent job in building the website, before she moved to her present job. Some of us compiled the material on the history, I typed it and put it on floppy disks and gave it to Pat who put it on the site, generally in the spring and summer of 2002.
About 100 years ago, Professor Edward Drake Roe at SU formed an undergraduate math club/honorary called Pi Mu Epsilon. In 1914 he chartered this at Albany as a national organization, which currently has 326 chapters in every state and DC. (The 327th chapter is scheduled this fall for Case Western Reserve.) I do not know the current membership, but in 1964 it had 45,000 members in almost 100 chapters. It was started here. After his first wife died, he married Josephine Robinson, a math professor at Berea College in KY. She earned her Ph.D. in Math at SU in 1918, the 9th SU math Ph.D., the first woman math Ph.D. at SU and one of the first in the US. The editor of the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal is Professor Brigitte Servatius of Worchester Tech; she earned her Ph.D. here under Professor Jack Graver.
This opens with the text of a lecture given in September 1980, at the request of the math graduate students, on the history of mathematics at SU. The lecturer was Professor Donald E. Kibbey, who was the chair of our department for over 20 years ending in 1971. We were very fortunate that Professors Gerald Cargo and Carl Kohls had taped Kibbey’s lecture, we transcribed it, I added footnotes and Professor Cargo added the names of early Ph.Ds in the Dept. Professor Kibbey went back to the University archives and compiled considerable history beginning with the founding of SU in 1870. Initially the entire University had 5 faculty members, including the chancellor; one of the 5 was a mathematician named John Raymond French. Professor Tadeusz Iwaniec holds the French professorship. Profesor Kibbey came to SU in 1946 and so he knew first hand considerable information about the Dept. If you look at the excellent chart of math faculty over the years compiled by Mary DeCarlo and Bill Vogel of the Math Library, you will notice a big expansion of the Math Dept in the years starting in 1943. In 1943 Professor W. T. Martin, an assistant professor at MIT, joined the Department and started a large increase, including some outstanding mathematicians; in 1946 MIT saw the results and hired him back as full professor and chair. Professor Kibbey split the years starting with 1870 into three periods, and the last, the modern period, began in 1943. You will find considerable information in Kibbey’s lecture.
In September 1981 at the request of the math graduate students, Professor Jack Graver (then Dept chair) gave a lecture on his projections of the future of the Department. As he noted, this is a chancy undertaking, but his remarks were interesting and prescient.
Professor Erik Hemmingsen wrote Recollections of the Department of Mathematics until 1960. Professor Hemmingsen joined the Dept in 1947 and he has many interesting remarks about the faculty during these years of change. I added some footnotes about people and events mentioned.
This item lists the Chairs and terms of office beginning with Martin in 1943. Prior to 1943 there had been separate departments of mathematics in Business, Engineering and Liberal Arts (now called Arts and Sciences), and Martin united them.
In 1971 the department decided that there should be a department constitution and elected 4 of us as a committee to draft it. Basically we codified existing practice, except that we set up very careful procedures for faculty personnel matters: renewal and non-renewal of appointment, tenure and promotion. This was the suggestion of Professor Daniel Waterman, a committee member, and in retrospect it was a wise move.
These are two documents constructed from a letter of Professor Erik Hemmingsen. Over the door to the Math Library it reads Erik Hemmingsen Mathematics Collection, in view of his enormous contributions to it.
I came to SU with a new Ph.D. in 1958 and retired at age 70 in 2001. In 2002 I compiled biographies of 40 faculty members (present, emeriti and deceased), who had served at SU for at least 20 years. Each biography was based on the individual's cv (curriculum vitae), included only such personal/family information as the individual wished, and was posted only after it was fully approved by the faculty member. In the case of deceased faculty the biography was based an article in The Record and/or a memorial statement read at the Arts and Sciences faculty meeting. 80% of the reports were a typed page or less, but a few are longer (e.g. Professors Graver and Kibbey) because of their extensive contributions.
Professor Gaunce Lewis died in May 2006, and the Mathematical Association of America (which has 27,000 members) lists on its website 15 particularly distinguished mathematicians who died that year. Professor Lewis is one of them, and they cite our Math Dept website for his biography. Unfortunately, in August 2006 the Dept’s website was transferred to a new location, and the biographies of deceased and retired faculty were not transferred. Our office staff is extremely efficient and busy, but they have not had time. Thank you for this opportunity.
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