Date: Sat, 31 Jan 1998 10:57:48 -0400 (AST) Subject: sad news Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 17:04:36 -0500 (EST) From: Peter Freyd Sammy Eilenberg died today. He had been unconscious since June. Knowing it was inevitable doesn't really help. Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 10:11:51 -0400 (AST) Subject: RE: sad news Date: Sat, 31 Jan 1998 23:49:46 -0500 (EST) From: Fred E J Linton On Fri, 30 Jan 1998 17:04:36 -0500 (EST) Peter Freyd wrote: > Sammy Eilenberg died today. As someone who had long secretly seen Sammy as a sort of second father figure, I am somewhat unnerved that the date of his death coincided so perfectly with what would have been exactly my mother's 102nd birthday. R.i.P. -- Fred Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 10:17:42 -0400 (AST) Subject: Sammy obits Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 18:22:14 -0500 (EST) From: Peter Freyd Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company February 3, 1998, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final NAME: Samuel Eilenberg SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 1; Metropolitan Desk LENGTH: 660 words HEADLINE: Samuel Eilenberg, Dies; Mathematician at Columbia BYLINE: By ERIC PACE BODY: Samuel Eilenberg, an eminent mathematician and collector of Asian art, died on Friday at the Isabella Geriatric Center in upper Manhattan, where he had been for three months. He was 84 and had been a longtime resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He had been in poor health for the last three years, said Robert L. Poster, one of the co-executors of his estate. Dr. Eilenberg retired in 1982 as a University Professor, the highest professorial rank, at Columbia University, where he had taught since 1947. He was born in Warsaw and moved in 1939 to the United States, where he became renowned for his work in the fields of algebraic topology and homological algebra. He served twice as chairman of Columbia's mathematics department, and taught at the University of Michigan from 1940 to 1946 and at the University of Indiana in 1946 and 1947. In 1986, he was a co-winner, with Atle Selberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, of the $100,000 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics. Beginning in the mid-1950's, Dr. Eilenberg amassed an art collection comprising many small sculptures and other artifacts, in bronze, silver, stone and other materials. The works were made between the 3d century B.C. and the 17th century in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Central Asia. The collection came to be valued at more than $5 million. Then in 1987, he gave more than 400 artifacts from the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which put on a show of holdings from his collection, "The Lotus Transcendent: Indian and Southeast Asian Art From the Samuel Eilenberg Collection," in 1991 and 1992. In return for his generosity, the museum raised most of the $1.5 million necessary to create the Samuel Eilenberg Visiting Professorship of Mathematics at Columbia. Another member of Columbia's mathematics department, Prof. John W. Morgan, said, "The theme that runs through Sammy's mathematics is always to find the absolutely essential ingredients in any problem and work only with those ingredients and nothing else -- in other words, to get rid of all the superfluous information." When someone once asked Professor Eilenberg if he could eat Chinese food with three chopsticks, he answered, "Of course," according to Professor Morgan. The questioner asked, "How are you going to do it?" and Professor Eilenberg replied, "I'll take the three chopsticks, I'll put one of them aside on the table, and I'll use the other two." Dr. Eilenberg always applied that simplifying approach in his mathematical work, Professor Morgan said, and that helped him in his pioneering work in algebraic topology. In the 1930's, 40's and 50's, he was one of the main researchers in algebraic topology, the use of algebraic techniques to study problems involving shapes. Professor Eilenberg also helped develop a related field, homological algebra. He and a co-author, Prof. Norman E. Steenrod of Princeton University, collaborated in studying algebraic topology. They set out their findings in a 1952 book, "Foundations of Algebraic Topology" (Books on Demand), which is one of the primary sources in the field. The two mathematicians developed axioms, or rules, for analyzing objects through algebraic topology. "The Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms were crucial," Professor Morgan said, "in exposing the essential features of the constructions of algebraic topology." Professor Eilenberg's mathematical work in algebraic topology began in his native Warsaw in the mid-1930's, while he was studying at the University of Warsaw. He received his doctorate there in 1936. His many writings include the book "Homological Algebra" (Princeton, 1956) which he wrote with Henri Cartan. Professor Eilenberg received Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and other professional groups. His 1960 marriage to Natasha Chterenzon ended in divorce in 1969. GRAPHIC: Photo: Samuel Eilenberg (Columbia University) Copyright 1998 The Chronicle Publishing Co. The San Francisco Chronicle FEBRUARY 3, 1998, TUESDAY, FINAL EDITION SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A15; OBITUARIES LENGTH: 403 words HEADLINE: Samuel Eilenberg LINE: New York BODY: Samuel Eilenberg, eminent mathematician and collector of Asian art, died Friday. He was 84 and had been a longtime resident of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Professor Eilenberg retired in 1982 as a university professor, the highest professorial rank, from Columbia University, where he had taught since 1947. He was born in Warsaw and moved in 1939 to the United States, where he became renowned for his work in the fields of algebraic topology and homological algebra. He served twice as chairman of Columbia's mathematics department, and taught at the University of Michigan from 1940 to 1946 and at the University of Indiana in 1946 and 1947. In 1986, he was a co-winner, with Atle Selberg of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, of the $ 100,000 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Professor Eilenberg amassed an art collection comprising many small sculptures and other artifacts, in bronze, silver, stone and other materials. The works were made between the third century B.C. and the 17th century in Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Central Asia. The collection came to be valued at more than $ 5 million. In 1987, he gave more than 400 artifacts from the collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which put on a show titled ''The Lotus Transcendent: Indian and Southeast Asian Art From the Samuel Eilenberg Collection,'' in 1991 and 1992. In return for his generosity, the museum raised most of the $ 1.5 million necessary to create the Samuel Eilenberg Visiting Professorship of Mathematics at Columbia. In the 1930s, '40s and '50s, he was one of the main researchers in algebraic topology, the use of algebraic techniques to study problems involving shapes. Professor Eilenberg also helped develop a related field, homological algebra. He and a co-author, Norman Steenrod of Princeton University, collaborated in studying algebraic topology. They set out their findings in a 1952 book, ''Foundations of Algebraic Topology'' (Books on Demand), which is one of the primary sources in the field. His many writings include the book ''Homological Algebra'' (Princeton, 1956) which he wrote with Henri Cartan. Professor Eilenberg received Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and other professional groups. Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 14:44:29 -0400 (AST) Subject: Montebello on Eilenberg Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 06:24:08 -0500 (EST) From: Peter Freyd Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company The New York Times February 6, 1998, Friday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section D; Page 19; Column 1; Classified LENGTH: 71 words HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths EILENBERG, SAMUEL BODY: EILENBERG - Samuel. The Trustees and staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art mourn the passing of Samuel Eilenberg, a longtime friend and Benefactor of the Museum. His generous gift of Indian and Southeast Asian works of art from a superb collection that he amassed over decades has greatly enhanced The Metropolitan's collections and will endure in the galleries for a grateful public. Philippe de Montebello, Director Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 14:45:36 -0400 (AST) Subject: on the NYUT Sammy obit Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 10:59:03 -0500 (EST) From: F W Lawvere We noted that the Feb 3 New York Times description of Sammy Eilenberg's life contained notable ommissions, and in particular seriously under-represents the glorious achievements of the Columbia University Math Dept. Therefore we are sending the following letter to the Times, hoping that they'll print it. Editor: We were moved by your obituary of Professor Samuel Eilenberg, the eminent Columbia University mathematician. Our lives, like those of his many other students and colleagues around the world, were profoundly influenced by his 'insistence on getting to the bottom of things'. It is widely known in the mathematical community that Professor Eilenberg's most influential long-term collaboration was with the senior US mathematician Saunders Mac Lane, of the University of Chicago. Their joint discovery in 1945 of the theory of transformations between mathematical categories provided the tools without which Sammy's important collaborations with Steenrod and Cartan, which you mentioned, would not have been possible. That joint work laid also the basis for Sammy's pioneering work in theoretical computer science and for a great many continuing developments in geometry, algebra, and the foundations of mathematics. In particular, the Eilenberg-Mac Lane theory of categories was indispensable to the 1960 development, by the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, of the powerful form of algebraic geometry which was an ingredient in several recent advances in number theory, including Wiles' work on the Fermat theorem. Sincerely, Professor F. W. Lawvere, SUNY Buffalo Professor P.J. Freyd, University of Pennsylvania Date: Tue, 3 Mar 1998 07:46:20 -0500 (EST) From: Peter Freyd The AMS Notices will publish a memorial article for Sammy. These projects are put together in a hurry and who gets asked to submit remarks is something of a random process. In this case it's Hyman Bass, Henri Cartan, Alex Heller, Saunders Mac Lane and I. Hy will also provide a narrative vita. Please send me material you'd like included. If I get too many suggestions, I will, with your permission, not include any of them in the Notices but will publish -- after the Notices -- memorial pages in the JPAA. Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1998 11:23:50 -0500 (EST) From: James Stasheff Subject: Re: categories: Memorial article Hopefully one of the writers will include Sammy's work with John Moore cf. the EMSS ************************************************************ Until August 10, 1998, I am on leave from UNC and am at the University of Pennsylvania Jim Stasheff jds@math.upenn.edu 146 Woodland Dr Lansdale PA 19446 (215)822-6707 Jim Stasheff jds@math.unc.edu Math-UNC (919)-962-9607 Chapel Hill NC FAX:(919)-962-2568 27599-3250 On Tue, 3 Mar 1998, Peter Freyd wrote: > The AMS Notices will publish a memorial article for Sammy. These > projects are put together in a hurry and who gets asked to submit > remarks is something of a random process. In this case it's Hyman > Bass, Henri Cartan, Alex Heller, Saunders Mac Lane and I. Hy will > also provide a narrative vita. > > Please send me material you'd like included. If I get too many > suggestions, I will, with your permission, not include any of them in > the Notices but will publish -- after the Notices -- memorial pages in > the JPAA. > Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 17:49:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Peter Freyd Subject: categories: Sammy The Editor of the AMS Notices, Tony Knapp, has kindly given me permission to post my part of Sammy's memorial collection. I trust that it's clear that it shouldn't be forwarded to any other list. For historical reasons (I guess) I've restored a number of paragraphs that were deleted from the final version -- they are marked with a | running down the left margin. And I've added a few footnotes. Let me take the opportunity to mention that Tony's editorial services were greatly appreciated, in particular, he caught a number of places where my original ms would have been much misunderstood. Thirty years ago I found myself a neighbor of Arthur Upham Pope, the master of ancient Persian art. He had retired in his 90s to an estate in the center of the city of Shiraz in southern Iran where I lived -- briefly -- across the street. I found an excuse for what has to be called an audience and I mentioned that I was a friend of Samuel Eilenberg. ``I don't know him.'' he said, ``I know _of_ him, of course. How do you know him?'' ``We work in the same area of mathematics.'' ``You're talking about a different Eilenberg. I meant the dealer in Indian art.'' ``Actually, it's the same person. He's both a mathematician and a collector of Indian art.'' ``Don't be silly, young man. The Eilenberg I mean is not a _collector_ of Indian art, he's the _dealer_ in Indian art. I know him well. He established the historicity of one of the Persian kings.[1] He certainly is not a mathematician.'' End of audience. * * * In later years even Arthur Upham Pope would have known. Eilenberg became universally known as ``Professor'' in the art world; indeed, if one walked with him in London or Zurich or even Philadelphia and one heard ``Professor!'' it was always Eilenberg who was being hailed and it was always the art world hailing him. If you heard ``Sammy!'', you knew it was a mathematician. * * * It was complicated, explaining that name. If you were my age and knew him first through his works, it was hard to conceive of him as ``Sammy''. And when you met him for the first time, it was even harder. You already knew that he was in charge of entire fields of mathematics -- indeed, he had created a number of them -- and when you met him you knew that he was in charge of the room you were in and it didn't matter whose room it was. Sammy? The name didn't fit. But he had to have a name like Sammy. I said it was hard to explain. Here was one of the most aggressive people you would ever meet. He'd challenge almost anything. If you mentioned something about the weather he'd challenge you -- once in California I heard him insist that it wasn't weather; it was climate. But somehow it was almost always clear: you'd could challenge him right back. Aggressive and challenging, but not at all pompous. You can't be pompous with a name like Sammy.[2] * * * | Once a gang of us spent an evening in a bar in San Antonio, Texas, | on the occasion of an annual AMS meeting. Most of us, except for | Sammy, ranged in age from very young to thirtysomething. As usual, | it was a series of pitched battles between Sammy and the rest of us, | and before the evening was out, the bartender became part of the | crowd. The next day I told him that Sammy was a world-famous | mathematician and when he wouldn't believe it I asked him to go to | anyone in his bar who looked like a mathematician and ask about | Samuel Eilenberg. He still wouldn't believe it. I don't know if he | would have believed the part about Indian art. * * * Sammy kept his two worlds, mathematics and art, at something of a distance. But both worlds seemed to agree on one thing, the very one that Arthur Upham Pope insisted upon. Sammy was the dealer. But the two worlds only seemed to agree on this. Without question, Sammy loved playing the role of dealer. In the days when mathematicians were in demand and jobs were easy to come by, Sammy loved to tell about the math market he was going to create. The trade would be in mathematician futures: ``This one's only done two lemmas and one proposition in the last year; the most recent theorem was two years ago; better sell this one at a loss.'' With his big cigar (expensive) and his big gold ring (in fact a valuable Indian artifact) he could enter his dealer mode at a moment's notice and one always wondered just how many young mathematicians' careers were in his hands. But his two worlds, mathematics and art, perceived this role quite differently. In mathematics we understood that it was a role he loved playing, but that he was only playing. His being as a mathematician was what counted and he would have been the same mathematician whether or not he played the dealer, indeed, whether or not he played -- and he did -- a high-stakes poker. This was not so clear in his other world. | In 1981 Sammy was briefly my guest at St John's College, Cambridge, | where I was, for the year, an Overseas Fellow. In due course, he was | given a tour of the Asian collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum by | the appropriate functionary, and the two of them landed at high | table for dinner. There seems to be a stock of stories about | mathematicians not being appreciated at high tables, the best known | being Heinz Hopf's (unwitting) success in convincing his fellow | diners that he taught at a technical high school in Zurich. The | Fitzwilliam functionary was treating Sammy as some sort of rich | dealer who apparently taught mathematics on the side. Sammy went | along. But then the doyen of the Cambridge philosophy community let | it be known that he viewed Sammy as one of the two leading | mathematicians in the world. Next came an American from Missouri | who realized that Sammy was the same Eilenberg for whom a part of | the local museum was named. It went on from there.[3] * * * It was usually frustrating trying to explain to others how Sammy was perceived by his fellow mathematicians. Sammy had an unprintable way of saying that mathematics required both intelligence and aggression.[4] But imagine not knowing how his mathematics -- when he had finished -- would totally belie that aggression. Imagine not knowing how remarkably well-behaved his mathematics always was. Imagine not knowing how his mathematics -- when he had finished -- always seemed pre-ordained and how it seemed no more aggressive than, say, the sun rising at its appointed sunrise time. Forty years ago Sammy hoped to do the same for Indian bronzes. He had already acquired the reputation of being the best detector of fakes in the business and he believed he could axiomatize the process. He even had a provisional list of axioms and it was truly an elegant list. A few years later we found ourselves at a small French-style bistro in La Jolla, California. We had been out of touch: there had been an argument about mathematical ethics and somehow we had resolved it; the dinner was something of a celebration of the resolution. I asked him about his book on bronzes. ``The axioms failed.'' ``What does that mean?'' ``It means that I've been taken. I bought a fake.'' He had suspected it only after it had been in his bedroom for a few weeks. He had the pleasure, at least, of investigating until he found out the master faker and he had the pleasure of going to the master faker's studio, not to berate hem but to congratulate him. * * * After that, Sammy made a point of not building bridges between his two worlds. I recall just one exception. He moved from a conversation about sculpture to one about mathematics. Sculptors, he had said, learn early to create from the inside out: what finally is to be seen on the surface is the result of a lot of work in conceptualizing the interior. But there are a few others: there are those for whom the interior is the result of a lot of work on getting the surface right. ``And,'' Sammy asked, ``isn't that the case for my mathematics?'' Style was only one part of his mathematics -- as, of course, he knew -- but there are, indeed, wonderful stories about Sammy, by attending only to what seemed the most superficial of stylistic choices, succeeding in restructuring an entire subject on the spot. Many have witnessed this triumph of style over substance, particularly with students. But the the most dramatic example had a stellar cast. D.C.Spencer gave a colloquium at Columbia in the Spring of '62, and Sammy decided it was time to demonstrate his get-rid-of-subscripts rule: ``If you define it right, you won't need a subscript''. Spencer, with the greatest of charm -- it was for good reason that he was already affectionately known as ``Uncle Don'' -- followed Sammy's orders and proceeded to restructure his subject while standing there at the board. One by one, the subscripts disappeared, each disappearance preceded by a Sammy-dictated redefinition. He had virtually no idea of the intended meanings of any of the symbols. he was operating entirely on the surface, looking only at the shape of the syntax. The process went on for several minutes, until Sammy took on the one proposition on the board. ``So now what does that say?'' ``Sammy, I don't know. You're the one making all the definitions.'' So Sammy applied his definitions and one by one the subscripts continued to disappear, until finally the proposition itself disappeared: it became the assertion that a thing was equal -- behold -- to itself. * * * | When he received an honorary doctorate in 1985, the University of | Pennsylvania cited him as ``our greatest mathematical stylist''.[5] | | * * * | | On that occasion, Sammy was just a little put out that one of his | fellow honorees seemed to be there for entirely political reasons. | At the commencement eve banquet he got into one of his better moods | and told the university president, ``When you choose your honorary | degrees correctly it is the university that is honored; when you | choose incorrectly it is they who are honored." The next day the | president -- not catching Sammy's subtext (fortunately, I guess) -- | incorporated these "inspiring words of Professor Eilenberg's'' into | his commencement address. It wasn't easy to keep a straight face. * * * ``My mother's father had the town brewery and he had one child, a daughter. He went to the head of the town yeshiva and asked for the best student.'' Sammy told me one day. ``So my future father became a brewer instead of a rabbi.'' Sammy regarded pre-war Poland with some affection. He felt that he had been well nurtured by the Polish community of mathematicians and he told me of his pleasure on being received by Stefan Banach, himself, a process of being welcomed to the holy of holies, the cafe in which Banach spent his time during the annual Polish mathematical conferences. By the time he came to the U.S. in his mid 20s Sammy was a well-known topologist. When I questioned him on his attitude about pre-war Poland, he answered that one must ``watch the derivative'': don't judge just by how good things are, but by how fast they're becoming better.[6] Sammy's view of Poland since the war was more complicated. It was particularly complicated by what he viewed as its treatment of category theory as a fringe subject. * * * In the late 1950s, Sammy began to concentrate his mathematical activities -- both research and dealing -- on category theory. He and Mac Lane had invented the subject, but to them, it was always an applied subject, not an end in itself. Categories were defined in order to define functors, which, in turn, were defined in order to define natural transformations, which were defined, finally, in order to prove theorems that could not be proved before. In this view, category theory belonged in the mainstream of mathematics. There was another view, the categories-as-fringe view. It said that categories were defined in order to _state_ theorems that could not be stated before, that they were not tools but objects of nature worthy of study in their own right. Sammy believed this counter-view was a direct interference with his role as the chief dealer for category theory. He had watched many of his inventions become standard mathematics -- singular homology, obstruction theory, homological algebra -- and he had no intention of leaving the future of category theory to others. Today the language of category theory has permeated a good part of mathematics and is treated with some respect. It was not ever so. There were years before the words "category" and "functor" could be pronounced unapologetically in mixed mathematical company. One of my fonder memories comes from sitting next to Sammy in the early 60s when Frank Adams gave his first lectures on how every functor on finite dimensional vector spaces gives rise to a natural transformation on the K-functor. Frank used that construction to obtain what are now called the Adams operations and he used those to count how many independent vector fields there could be on a sphere. It was not until then that it become permissible to say "functor" without a little snort. In those years, Sammy was a one-man employment agency for a fresh generation of mathematicians who viewed categories not just as a language but as potentially central mathematical subject. For the next 35 years he went to just about every category theory conference, and much more important, he used his masterly expository skills to convey categorical ideas to other mathematicians. Sammy's efforts succeeded for the language of category theory and he never gave up with his efforts for the theory itself. He was confident that the categorical view would eventually be the standard mathematical view, with or without his salesmanship. Its inevitability would be based on the theorems whose proofs required it. That was obvious to Sammy. He wanted to make it obvious to everyone else. [1] Sammy published a paper showing that some gold coins he had were produced during the king's reign. [2] In the final version the use of the 2nd person in the last three paragraphs was replaced with something more standard, as were the contractions. [3] The dinner was actually at Kings, the functionary was the relevant curator, the philosopher was R.B.Braithwaite. I wasn't there -- Sammy told me about it the next day and with great relish. [4] What was found to be unprintable was already a bowdlerization: Sammy liked to say that when you did mathematics you were using not just your brains but your guts. (Well, all right, it wasn't guts, but another plural body part far from the brain; I like to believe that Sammy would, in time, have agreed to my translation.) Dick Kadison tells me that in the very first utterance was in reply to a lunch-time question put by the physicist, Polykarp Kusch, "Sammy, what is it you use to do mathematics?" And in that very first utterance (as opposed to the way Sammy enjoyed saying it thereafter) the body-part in question was not plural but quite singular. [5] This sentence will appear in Hy Bass's opening narrative vita for the Notices' memorial collection. [6] A paragraph I used in an earlier draft as a bridge into the category material: Thus, in 1961 Sammy was one of the first American scientists to journey to Russia. A.G.Kurosch reciprocated with a visit to the U.S. and because the two visits ended up being at the same time, the two did not meet. Pity. We wondered would have time happened if Sammy had heard Kurosch's opening words at his colloquium lecture: ``We in Russia believe that category theory is destined to be as important as lattice theory.'' As it was, no one relished the task of repeating those words to Sammy. Actually, now that I think about it, everybody looked forward to seeing Sammy's reaction when the words were repeated. Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 15:46:28 -0300 (ADT) From: Bob Rosebrugh Subject: categories: Mac Lane on Eilenberg I haven't noticeed anyone on the list point out this article as yet... www.unipissing.ca/topology/t/o/p/c/52.htm It is on the following site which contains many interesting items: www.unipissing.ca/topology/topcom.htm regards, Bob Rosebrugh