From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/6574 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Phil Scott Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Denis Higgs Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 07:21:35 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Reply-To: Phil Scott NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1299519604 25874 80.91.229.12 (7 Mar 2011 17:40:04 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 17:40:04 +0000 (UTC) To: categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Mon Mar 07 18:40:00 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtpx.mta.ca ([138.73.1.114]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1PwePX-00028J-HF for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:39:59 +0100 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:42605) by smtpx.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1PwePQ-00051z-2F; Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:39:52 -0400 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1PwePM-00068Y-L9 for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:39:48 -0400 Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:6574 Archived-At: Dear Category Theorists: It is with great sadness that I wish to report the recent death of my teacher Denis Higgs, known to many of the older generation of category theorists. Denis was an extremely creative and principled man, who was a mathematician and political activist in South Africa during the early, turbulent 1960s. He immigrated to Canada (to Waterloo's Dept. of Pure Mathematics) in the late 1960s. Denis had wide mathematical interests and published in many fields, including combinatorics, universal algebra, category theory, and in later years algebraic integration and abstract summability theory. A list of his publications can be seen in MathSciNet. In category theory, he wrote an influential and beautiful long paper, "A category approach to boolean valued set theory", which initiated many early students in topos theory in the 1970s to Omega-valued sets. (Unfortunately, only parts of this work were ever published.) With Keith Rowe he worked on nuclear maps. His universal characterization of the interval [0,\infty] led to his subsequent work on algebraic integration theory, and is related to modern work on midpoint algebras. In later years he developed a profound interest in abstract summability theory, which began with his papers on Sigma Groups and their representation theory in the 1980s and early '90s. Alas, an automobile accident about 15 years ago left him in a very difficult and painful state, which he endured with great courage. He continued his researches when his health permitted, and he was working on a monograph on abstract summability theory when his health recently deteriorated. His students remember him as a brilliant and kind scientist and mentor, who will be greatly missed. Philip Scott Dept. of Mathematics U. Ottawa [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]