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Charles Frederick Wells (4 May 1937 in Atlanta, Georgia – 17 June 2017)^[1]^[2] was an American mathematician known for his fundamental contributions to category theory. He was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University.^[3]

Wells taught there for about 35 years, with sabbatical interruptions at ETH Zürich (in mathematics) and Oxford University (in computing science). He had a research career in mathematics in finite fields, group theory and category theory. In the last twenty years of this life he had also been interested in the language of mathematics and related issues concerning teaching and communicating abstract ideas.

Publications

In addition to his scholarly publications, Wells produced A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse,^[4]^[5] which is a dictionary of words and concepts used by mathematicians that are easily misunderstood, explained in a way that laypersons can also appreciate.

As a life-long shape note singer, in 2002 Wells jointly compiled a tunebook called Oberlin Harmony,^[6] which included some of his own compositions.

Books

Barr, Michael; Wells, Charles (1985), "Toposes, Triples and Theories" (PDF), Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, vol. 278, Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-96115-1.^[7]^[8]
Michael Barr and Charles Wells: Category Theory for Computing Science (1999).
Wells, Charles (2003), A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse, Infinity Publishing, ISBN 0-7414-1685-9.

Selected research articles

Wells, Charles (1974), "Polynomials over finite fields which commute with translations", Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 46 (3): 347–350, doi:10.1090/S0002-9939-1974-0347785-5

Surveys

Sketches (1993) – a survey of the literature on sketches

References

^ Birth and Career Data from American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004
^ misterZ3r0 (26 June 2017). "Update on AbstractMath.org: a website that provided an introduction to advanced mathematics". reddit/learnmath. Archived from the original on 22 March 2018. Retrieved 2 November 2024. I am sorry to inform the community that Professor Charles Wells who ran the website as a free resource passed away on June 17, 2017. I received a reply to an email inquiring Professor Wells why the website was down. Here was the reply: Hi Eugene... this Matt Wells, Charles' son. Sad to report that Dad died suddenly and peacefully on Saturday night. He left behind all of the instructions on how to fix the website, so we'll figure it out eventually. matt{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
^ "Home page at CWRU". Archived from the original on 2016-12-31. Retrieved 2012-02-15.
^ Negative review: Krantz, Steven G. (September 2004), "Book Review: A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse" (PDF), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 51 (8): 897–898
^ Positive review: Selden, Annie (February 27, 2014), "MAA Review: A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse", Mathematical Association of America Reviews
^ Charles Wells, Chloe Maher, Oberlin Harmony (2002, Oberlin, Ohio). Incomplete table of contents given in: "Oberlin Harmony". Hymnary.org. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
^ Pitts, A. (1991), "Review of Toposes, Triples and Theories by Barr, M., & Wells, C.", Journal of Symbolic Logic, 56 (1): 340–341, doi:10.2307/2274934, JSTOR 2274934
^ Rota, Gian-Carlo (1986), "Toposes, Triples and Theories: M. Barr and C. Wells, Springer, 1985, 345 pp.", Advances in Mathematics, 61 (2): 184, doi:10.1016/0001-8708(86)90076-9, (complete review) The elements of category theory are presented with unsurpassed clarity and full motivation, and then applied to describe with equal cogency the closely related ideas of topoes, triples, and equationally defined algebraic theories. One or two more books like this one and universal algebra might take off.

External links

"Charles Wells". CWRU. Archived from the original on 2016-12-31. Retrieved 2012-02-15.
Gyre & Gimble – blog on the language of math, category theory, and teaching abstract ideas
Abstract Math – for university-level math students