William S. Massey

William Schumacher Massey (August 23, 1920^[1] – June 17, 2017) was an American mathematician, known for his work in algebraic topology. The Massey product is named for him. He worked also on the formulation of spectral sequences by means of exact couples, and wrote several textbooks, including A Basic Course in Algebraic Topology (ISBN 0-387-97430-X).

William Schumacher Massey
Born	(1920-08-20)August 20, 1920 Granville, Illinois, United States
Died	June 17, 2017(2017-06-17) (aged 96) Hamden, Connecticut, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Chicago Princeton University
Known for	Massey product Blakers–Massey theorem Exact couple
Spouse	Ethel H. Massey
Children	3
Scientific career
Fields	Topology
Institutions	Brown University Yale University
Thesis	Classification of mappings of an (n + 1)-dimensional space into an n-sphere (1948)
Doctoral advisor	Norman Steenrod
Military career
Allegiance	United States
Branch	United States Navy
Years of service	1942–1945

Life

William Massey was born in Granville, Illinois, in 1920, the son of Robert and Alma Massey, and grew up in Peoria. He was an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. After serving as a meteorologist aboard aircraft carriers in the United States Navy for 4 years during World War II, he received a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1949.^[2] His dissertation, titled Classification of mappings of an ${\displaystyle (n+1)}$-dimensional space into an n-sphere, was written under the direction of Norman Steenrod. He spent two additional years at Princeton as a post-doctoral research assistant.^[3] He then taught for ten years on the faculty of Brown University. In 1958 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[4] From 1960 till his retirement he was a professor at Yale University. He died on June 17, 2017, in Hamden, Connecticut. He had 23 PhD students, including Donald Kahn, Larry Smith, and Robert Greenblatt.

Selected works

• Algebraic topology: an introduction. NY: Harcourt, Brace & World. 1967; xix+261 pp.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link) 4th corrected printing. 1977.
• Homology and cohomology theory. Monographs and Textbooks in Pure and Applied Mathematics. Vol. 46. New York: Marcel Dekker. 1978; xiv+412 pp.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)^[5]
• Singular homology theory. Graduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer-Verlag. 1980; xii+265 pp.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)^[6]
• A basic course in algebraic topology. Springer. 1991. ISBN 9780387974309. 3rd corrected printing. 1997.
• Massey, William S. (1952). "Exact couples in algebraic topology. I, II". Annals of Mathematics. Second Series. 56: 363–396. doi:10.2307/1969805. JSTOR 1969805. MR 0052770.

See also

• Blakers–Massey theorem
• Exact couple
• Massey product

External links

• Address at Yale