Charles Wells (mathematician)


Charles Wells was an American mathematician known for his fundamental contributions to category theory. He was Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University.
Wells taught there for about 35 years, with sabbatical interruptions at ETH Zürich and Oxford University. 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 and related issues concerning teaching and communicating abstract ideas.

Publications

In addition to his scholarly publications, Wells produced A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse, 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, which included some of his own compositions.

Books