Joseph Roitberg
1942-2015

Joe was one of the founding members of the CUNY Topology seminar. His insight and enthusiasm was crucial to the success of the seminar. Joe got his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Courant Institute at NYU in 1968 under the supervision of Michael Kervaire. After several years at City College and SUNY Stonybrook, Joe joined the faculty at Hunter College in 1972 and the Graduate Center faculty in 1974. He was a visitor several times at the Institute for Advanced Study and at the University of Rochester. Joe was an exceptionally good teacher and many thousands of Hunter College students have learned mathematics under Joe's skilled instruction.

Joe was a renaissance mathematician who worked on numerous disparate topics. For example he wrote important papers on localizaton of nilpotent spaces (notably the 1975 paper “Localization of nilpotent groups and spaces”, that he wrote with P. Hilton and G. Mislin), numerous papers on the delicate subject of phantom maps with Chuck McGibbom and famously the construction (with Peter Hilton) of the first example of an H-space that was not a Lie group (“On principal S3-bundles over spheres”, Ann. of Math, 1969). Its existence was not expected (hence the name Hilton-Roitberg criminal). The “criminal” spawned the field of abstract H-spaces, which has revealed beautiful structure and application.

Joe had a great love of music, an extremely sharp sense of humor and of course was a wonderful topologist.

There will be a memorial at the Graduate Center lounge (Rm 4214) Friday April 20 5:00-7:30.
John Harper of Rochester University will give a lecture: "A survey of the mathematical work of Joseph Roitberg".