On this date in 2005, mathematician Saunders Mac Lane died at 95.
Related material —
Max Planck quotations:
Mac Lane on Boolean algebra:
Mac Lane’s summary chart (note the absence of Galois geometry ):
I disagree with Mac Lane’s assertion that “the finite models of
Boolean algebra are dull.” See Boole vs. Galois in this journal.
In memory of
Irving Kaplansky,
who died on
Sunday, June 25, 2006
“Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.”
— T. S. Eliot
Kaplansky received his doctorate in mathematics at Harvard in 1941 as the first Ph.D. student of Saunders Mac Lane.
From the April 25, 2005, Harvard Crimson:
Ex-Math Prof Mac Lane, 95, Dies
Gade University Professor of Mathematics Barry Mazur, a friend of the late Mac Lane, recalled that [a Mac Lane paper of 1945] had at first been rejected from a lower-caliber mathematical journal because the editor thought that it was “more devoid of content” than any other he had read.“Saunders wrote back and said, ‘That’s the point,'” Mazur said. “And in some ways that’s the genius of it. It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary that incorporates the theory and nothing else.”
He likened it to a sparse grammar of nouns and verbs and a limited vocabulary that is presented “in such a deft way that it will help you understand any language you wish to understand and any language will fit into it.”
A sparse grammar of lines from Charles Sanders Peirce (Harvard College, class of 1859):
Related entry: Binary Geometry.
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