Sabri Oncu wrote: > But it is better to be fair, at least, in the case of Lebesque. As far as I > know, or was told, a short while later he got his PhD and a year after that > his PhD thesis was published as a book.
my understanding is that his dissertation was his thesis on measure theory. a couple years later he had arguments with the French mathematician Baire, but as equals. on the other hand, it would be interesting to track the evolution of his theory into mainstream math. and i would hypothesize that it became accepted in part because there were interesting new *applications* for the theory, in probability, in stochastic processes, in weird functions, in transform theory, and so forth. and all that stuff was -- in part -- inspired by new physics or new physical applications. > On the other hand, your next paragraph is a pretty good description of the reality of power plays in *individual departments*. each of the "tortured" fields you list are booming somewhere or other (true for solid and fluid mechanics, how's alg. topology doing these days???) les schaffer
