Mathematician:Hjalmar Ekdal/Historical Note

Historical Note on

 * Since this was a group project among three professors and five students, we played with the idea of choosing a pseudonym as the author of the book. So the question was, if we were going to be someone, who should we be? I had just taken a course on Henrik Ibsen (this was, after all, at St Olaf College, a Minnesota college founded by Norwegian-American Lutherans and very true to its heritage ­which was my heritage as well for that matter). I had been particularly taken by the play "The Wild Duck", whose main character is a man named . Hjalmar is a pathetic fellow who is unaware that almost everything he has has been provided for him --­ house, business, wife, even his child. He is also unaware that he is quite incapable of succeeding on his own.


 * So we decided to call ourselves since one way to look at what we were doing was collecting the work and examples provided by others­ cataloging rather than creating. We put up a big sign in the library alcove where we worked reading, "This space reserved for ," and posted quotations from, such as "I haven¹t quite solved it yet, but I'm working on it constantly."


 * And although the resulting book carries the names of the supervising faculty as the authors, Hjalmar does live on in that during that summer we had formulated a new example, and as its creators had the right to name it the Hjalmar Ekdal Topology ­ironically enough the only original example in the book.