Commentary on the Kervaire–Milnor correspondence 1958–1961
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- by Andrew Ranicki and Claude Weber PDF
- Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 52 (2015), 603-609 Request permission
Abstract:
The extant letters exchanged between Kervaire and Milnor during their collaboration from 1958–1961 concerned their work on the classification of exotic spheres, culminating in their 1963 Annals of Mathematics paper. Michel Kervaire died in 2007; for an account of his life, see the obituary by Shalom Eliahou, Pierre de la Harpe, Jean-Claude Hausmann, and Claude Weber in the September 2008 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The letters were made public at the 2009 Kervaire Memorial Conference in Geneva. Their publication in this issue of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society is preceded by our commentary on these letters, providing some historical background.References
- Alfred Aeppli, Modifikation von reellen und komplexen Mannigfaltigkeiten, Comment. Math. Helv. 31 (1957), 219–301 (German). MR 116363, DOI 10.1007/BF02564360
- Michel A. Kervaire, Non-parallelizability of the $n$-sphere for $n>7$, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 44 (1958), no. 3, 280–283. MR 3075371, DOI 10.1073/pnas.44.3.280
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Additional Information
- Andrew Ranicki
- Affiliation: School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
- MR Author ID: 144725
- Email: a.ranicki@ed.ac.uk
- Claude Weber
- Affiliation: Section de Mathématiques, Université de Genève, Switzerland
- MR Author ID: 193094
- Email: claude.weber@unige.ch
- Published electronically: July 1, 2015
- Additional Notes: We are grateful to Mme. Aimée Kervaire and John Milnor for permitting us to publish the correspondence.
- © Copyright 2015 American Mathematical Society
- Journal: Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 52 (2015), 603-609
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/bull/1508
- MathSciNet review: 3393348