20 Facts About Hassler Whitney

Hassler Whitney was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, characteristic classes, and geometric integration theory.

Hassler Whitney was born on March 23,1907, in New York City, where his father, Edward Baldwin Whitney, was the First District New York Supreme Court judge.

Hassler Whitney's mother, A Josepha Newcomb Whitney, was an artist and political activist.

Hassler Whitney was the paternal nephew of Connecticut Governor and Chief Justice Simeon Eben Baldwin, his paternal grandfather was William Dwight Whitney, professor of Ancient Languages at Yale University, linguist and Sanskrit scholar.

Hassler Whitney married three times: his first wife was Margaret R Howell, married on the 30 May 1930.

Finally, Hassler Whitney divorced his second wife and married Barbara Floyd Osterman on 8 February 1986.

The Hassler Whitney House survives today, along with the Field House, more than 75 years following its original construction; both are contributing structures in the historic Sudbury Road Area.

An accomplished player of the violin and the viola, Hassler Whitney played with the Princeton Musical Amateurs.

Hassler Whitney would run outside, 6 to 12 miles every other day.

Hassler Whitney was a member of the Swiss Alpine Society and the Yale Mountaineering Society and climbed most of the mountain peaks in Switzerland.

Three years after his third marriage, on 10 May 1989, Hassler Whitney died in Princeton, after suffering a stroke.

Hassler Whitney attended Yale University, where he received baccalaureate degrees in physics and in music, respectively in 1928 and in 1929.

Hassler Whitney was one of the major developers of cohomology theory, and characteristic classes, as these concepts emerged in the late 1930s, and his work on algebraic topology continued into the 40s.

Hassler Whitney returned to the study of functions in the 1940s, continuing his work on the extension problems formulated a decade earlier, and answering a question of Laurent Schwartz in a 1948 paper On Ideals of Differentiable Functions.

Hassler Whitney had, throughout the 1950s, an almost unique interest in the topology of singular spaces and in singularities of smooth maps.

Hassler Whitney spent many years in classrooms, both teaching mathematics and observing how it is taught.

Hassler Whitney spent four months teaching pre-algebra mathematics to a classroom of seventh graders and conducted summer courses for teachers.

Hassler Whitney traveled widely to lecture on the subject in the United States and abroad.

Hassler Whitney worked toward removing mathematical anxiety, which he felt leads young pupils to avoid mathematics.

Hassler Whitney spread the ideas of teaching mathematics to students in ways that relate the content to their own lives as opposed to teaching them rote memorization.