Erik christopher zeeman biography template

British mathematician (1925–2016)

Sir Erik Christopher ZeemanFRS^[1] (4 February 1925 – 13 February 2016), was a British mathematician,^[2] known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory.

Overview

Zeeman's main contributions to mathematics were in topology, particularly in knot theory, the piecewise linear category, and dynamical systems.

His 1955 thesis at the University of Cambridge described a new theory termed "dihomology", an algebraic structure associated to a topological space, containing both homology and cohomology, introducing what is now known as the Zeeman spectral sequence.

This was studied by Clint McCrory in his 1972 Brandeis thesis following a suggestion of Dennis Sullivan that one make "a general study of the Zeeman spectral sequence to see how singularities in a space perturb Poincaré duality".

This in turn led to the discovery of intersection homology by Robert MacPherson and Mark Goresky at Brown