New Light on the Life and Work of Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn (1882 – 1948)

During the closing quarter of the nineteenth century, a self-sustaining community of mathematical researchers emerged in the United States due largely to the combined influences of three mathematicians — two foreign and one American. In 1876, the English mathematician, James Joseph Sylvester, arrived at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University to set up the first real graduate-level program in mathematics in the United States. After Sylvester’s return to England in 1883, would-be American mathematical researchers turned to Europe — and particularly to Germany and Felix Klein — for their training. By the final decade of the century, however, changes in American higher education, such as the increasingly widespread adoption of the research ethic at the university level, provided educational opportunities, jobs, and incentives for research mathematicians as well as for researchers in the other academic disciplines. At the forefront of these developments, the University of Chicago opened in 1892 with research, graduate teaching, and undergraduate instruction among its articulated institutional goals. In mathematics, Eliakim Hastings Moore and his colleagues, Oskar Bolza and Heinrich Maschke, worked successfully not only toward these aims but also toward the building of a national mathematical organization complete with professional society, publication outlets, and regular forums for active mathematical interchange. As David Rowe and I have argued elsewhere, this groundwork was firmly in place by 1900.1