Subject: categories: Two honorary degrees

From: Peter Freyd <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2006 09:56:39 -0400 (EDT)

The written version of the citations that were read at
    the memorial session at the recent CT06 conference:

**********************************************************************
		      UNIVERSITY of PENNSYLVANIA

    Citation accompanying the honorary degree of Doctor of Science
		      conferred on May 22, 1977

                          SAUNDERS MAC LANE

Following in the footsteps of Rene Descartes, Saunders Mac Lane has
shown that disparate parts of mathematics are categorically the same.

Establishing himself as a master of several specialties, he went on to
reach for universal solutions. In an age when mathematics has led to
increasingly complex resolutions, he has chosen to study the
similarities. By developing what seemed to some a nonsensical
abstraction for generalizing difficulties, he achieved a method for
unifying mathematics. Through his insistence that the triple of
algebra, analysis, and geometry are one, he has accomplished his
object -- the transformation of the map of mathematics.

As Max Mason Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics at the
University of Chicago, past president of the American Mathematics
Society, and current Vice President of the national Academy of
Sciences, Saunders Mac Lane has given distinguished service to the
community of American Scientists. Young mathematicians throughout the
world, in deriving extensions of his work, have recognized its truly
global dimension.

With the knowledge that, in Saunders Mac lane, the scholar and the
gentleman are naturally equivalent, and with particular gratitude for
his role in bringing excellence in mathematics to this university, the
Trustees are pleased to award a former colleague and Associate Trustee
the honorary degree, Doctor of Science.

**********************************************************************
		      UNIVERSITY of PENNSYLVANIA

    Citation accompanying the honorary degree of Doctor of Science
		      conferred on May 20, 1985

                           SAMUEL EILENBERG

Arriving in this country, a prodigy from Warsaw, when American
mathematics was but a kernel of its present image, you have nurtured
its growth over the years, and, in the process, naturally transformed
yourself into the most international as wall as the most American of
mathematicians.

A master theoretician of geometry, algebra, automata, and formal
languages -- our greatest mathematical stylist -- you defined the very
categories of modern mathematics. By mastering those categories you
enriched them, and by enriching them you laid the foundations for what
now is commonplace. When others were content to wrestle with the
complex, you created categories for the complex; when others ignored
the degeneracies, you faced them, when others found only obstructions
you founded the theory of obstructions. You created the exact tools to
classify the spaces of mathematics and the the space in which to
classify them. Your singular constructions became the standard. Your
style became _the_ style.

Expert in collecting Indonesian bronzes, and poker chips, while
eschewing formal honors, you have nonetheless garnered acclaim as
University Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University -- and
card-carrying member of the Society of Bourbaki. Aware that your
truest honor is the esteem in which are are held by your students,
including your colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, the
Trustees prevail upon you, Samuel Eilenberg, to accept from their hand
the formal proof of their admiration, the honorary degree, Doctor of
Science