Morton Brown (August 12, 1931 – August 3, 2024[1]) was an American mathematician who specialized in geometric topology.

Life and career

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Brown was born in New York City on August 12, 1931. In 1958 Brown earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under R. H. Bing. From 1960 to 1962 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afterwards he became a professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

With Barry Mazur in 1965 he won the Oswald Veblen prize[2] for their independent and nearly simultaneous proofs of the generalized Schoenflies hypothesis[3] in geometric topology. Brown's short proof was elementary and fully general. Mazur's proof was also elementary, but it used a special assumption which was removed via later work of Morse.

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[4]

References

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  1. ^ "Obituary — Morton Brown | The University Record". record.umich.edu. Retrieved December 7, 2024.
  2. ^ "Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry".
  3. ^ Brown, Morton (1960). "A proof of the generalized Schoenflies theorem". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 66 (2): 74–76. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1960-10400-4. MR0117695
  4. ^ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2012-11-10.
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