Andrew H. Wallace

Andrew Hugh Wallace (1926 – 18 January 2008) was a Scottish-American mathematician.

Biography Andrew Hugh Wallace was born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. He received in 1946 an MA in mathematics from Edinburgh University and in 1949 a PhD from St. Andrews University with thesis Rational integral functions and associated linear transformations. In the 1950s he was an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto in Canada. In 1959 he became a professor at Indiana University's mathematics department, where he was also department chair. In 1965 he left Indiana to become a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1986.

quote|Colleagues said his mathematical work was mainly concentrated in topology where he produced fundamental results reported on principally in his series of papers entitled "Modifications and Cobounding Manifolds." Here, he essentially settled in dimensions 5 and higher, the basic open problem regarding these geometric objects, though he did not push his results to an explicit statement of the solution. This was done by an independent method and almost simultaneously by Dr. Stephen Smale ... Dr. Wallace's work in the topology of three dimensional spaces was groundbreaking and remains frequently cited and used to the present day.