E. H. Moore

Eliakim Hastings Moore (January 26, 1862 – December 30, 1932) was an American mathematician.

Life

Moore, the son of a Methodist minister and grandson of US Congressman Eliakim H. Moore, discovered mathematics through a summer job at the Cincinnati Observatory while in high school. He learned mathematics at Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones and obtained a B.A. in 1883 and the Ph.D. in 1885 with a thesis, supervised by Hubert Anson Newton, on some work of William Kingdon Clifford and Arthur Cayley. Newton encouraged Moore to study in Germany, and thus he spent an academic year at the University of Berlin, attending lectures by Kronecker and Weierstrass.

On his return to the United States, Moore taught at Yale and at Northwestern University. When the University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892, Moore was the first head of its mathematics department, a position he retained until his death in 1931. His first two colleagues were Bolza and Maschke. The resulting department was the second research-oriented mathematics department in American history, after Johns Hopkins University. <!-- Until World War II, many Americans took doctoral degrees from European universities, especially Göttingen University. -->

Accomplishments

Moore first worked in abstract algebra, proving in 1893 that every finite field is a Galois field. Around 1900, he began working on the foundations of geometry. He...
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