Morton Brown

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Morton Brown (born August 12, 1931) is an American mathematician who specialized in geometric topology.

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Life and career

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 [1] for their independent and nearly simultaneous proofs of the generalized Schoenflies hypothesis [2] 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. [3]

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References

  1. "Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry".
  2. 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 . MR 0117695
  3. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2012-11-10.