On the mathematical work of J.H. Roberts
by
R.E. Hodel
Duke University

John Henderson Roberts died on Wednesday, October 8, 1997, at the age of 91. He had a long and distinguished career at Duke University from 1931 to 1971. During his 40 years at Duke he published 39 research papers and had 24 Ph.D. students, including R. Hodel, F. Slaughter, J. Smith, and J. Vaughan. My talk will focus on Roberts' research, which conveniently divides into two broad areas as follows: 1. Continua theory 2. Dimension theory. There will be a special emphasis on his work in the theory of metric-dependent dimension functions, an area of dimension theory developed by Nagami and Roberts during the 1960's.

Date received: February 10, 1998