Andrew Hugh Wallace

Background

Andrew Hugh Wallace was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Education

He received in 1946 an Master of Arts in mathematics from Edinburgh University and in 1949 a Doctor of Philosophy from Saint Andrews University with thesis Rational integral functions and associated linear transformations.

Career

In the 1950s he was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto in Canada. In 1959 he became a professor at Indiana University"s mathematics department, where he was also department chairman In 1965 he left Indiana to become a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1986.

Foreign the academic year 1964–1965 and the first five months of 1968 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Colleagues said his mathematical work was mainly concentrated in topology where he produced fundamental results reported on principally in his series of papers entitled “tions and Cobounding Manifolds.” Here, he essentially settled in dimensions 5 and higher, the basic open problem regarding these geometric objects, though he did not push his results to an explicit statement of the solution. This was done by an independent method and almost simultaneously by Doctor Stephen Smale.

Doctor Wallace’s work in the topology of three dimensional spaces was groundbreaking and remains frequently cited and used to the present day. His greatest passion during his later life was sailing.

He maintained a 35-foot craft.

After his retirement, he and a small crew sailed his boat across the Atlantic and Mediterranean to his new home in Crete. His name is attached to the Lickorish-Wallace theorem. J. 2". H. H.

Achievements

• In addition to his work in mathematics, Andrew Wallace was an accomplished pianist, dancer, painter, and sailor.