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Edwin Henry Spanier (August 8, 1921 – October 11, 1996) was an American mathematician at the University of California at Berkeley, working in algebraic topology. He co-invented Spanier–Whitehead duality and Alexander–Spanier cohomology, and wrote what was for a long time the standard textbook on algebraic topology (Spanier 1981).

Spanier attended the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1941. During World War II, he served in the United States Army Signal Corps. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan in 1947 for the thesis Cohomology Theory for General Spaces written under the direction of Norman Steenrod. After spending a year as a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1948 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Chicago, and then a professor at UC Berkeley in 1959. He had 17 doctoral students, including Morris Hirsch and Elon Lages Lima.

Publications

• Spanier, Edwin H. (1981) [first published in 1966], Algebraic topology. Corrected reprint, New York-Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. xvi+528, ISBN 0-387-90646-0, MR 0666554

References

• Edwin Spanier at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Retrieved on 2008-01-17
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Edwin Spanier", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews Retrieved on 2008-01-17
• Obituary, at the Notices of the American Mathematical Society
• Photos, at the Mathematical Research Institute of Oberwolfach