Raymond Louis Wilder

Raymond Louis Wilder (3 November 1896 in Palmer, Massachusetts – 7 July 1982 in Santa Barbara, California) was an American mathematician, who specialized in topology and gradually acquired philosophical and anthropological interests.

He played cornet in the family orchestra, which performed at dances and fairs, and accompanied silent films on the piano.

In 1926, Wilder joined the faculty of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he supervised 26 Ph.Ds and became a research professor in 1947.

Mathematicians who rubbed shoulders with Wilder at Michigan and who later proved prominent included Samuel Eilenberg, the cofounder of category theory, and the topologist Norman Steenrod.

After his 1967 retirement from Michigan at the rather advanced age of 71, Wilder became a research associate and occasional lecturer at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The mathematics department at the University of California annually bestows one or more graduating seniors with an award in Wilder's name.

The historical, philosophical, and anthropological writings of Wilder's later years suggest a warm, colorful personality.

A converse to the Jordan curve theorem, proved by Schönflies, states that a subset of the 2-sphere is a simple closed curve if it: In his "A converse of the Jordan-Brouwer separation theorem in three dimensions" (1930), Wilder showed that a subset of Euclidean 3-space whose complementary domains satisfied certain homology conditions was a 2-sphere.

This encounter proved fateful, and Wilder's research interests underwent a major change, towards the foundations of mathematics.