Edwin Henry Spanier 1921--1996

704 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 45, NUMBER 6 Edwin Henry Spanier died of cancer in Scottsdale, Arizona, on October 11, 1996. Born in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1921, he was graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1941 and then spent three years as a mathematician in the U. S. Army Signal Corps. He received his doctorate in mathematics in 1947 from the University of Michigan under the direction of Norman Steenrod. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1948. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Paris in the academic year 1952–53, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1958–59, and a Miller Research Fellow at Berkeley in 1961–62. His visiting appointments include positions in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, and at UCSD and UCLA. Spanier was appointed professor of mathematics at Berkeley in 1959 at the beginning of a period of rapid expansion of the mathematics department. An internationally recognized authority in the swiftly developing field of topology, he attracted first-class mathematicians as visitors and new faculty members. He played a major role in organizing new programs in geometry and topology, subjects in which Berkeley soon achieved preeminence. He served several times as vice chair and acting chair of the department and directed fourteen doctoral dissertations at Berkeley in addition to three at Chicago. In 1991 he became professor emeritus.