Jose Adem

José Adem was a Mexican mathematician who made many outstanding contributions to topology. He is remembered today for the "Adem relations" which were introduced in his Princeton Ph.D. thesis of 1952. He was born in Tuxpan, Veracruz, to Lebanese parents who had emigrated to Mexico. He showed an interest in mathematics from an early age, and moved to Mexico City in 1941 to pursue a degree in engineering and mathematics. He obtained his B.S. in mathematics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1949. During this time he met Solomon Lefschetz, a famous algebraic topologist who was spending prolonged periods of time in Mexico. Lefschetz recognized Adem's mathematical talent, and sent him as a doctoral student to Princeton University where he graduated in 1952. His dissertation, Iterations of the squaring operations in algebraic topology, was written under the supervision of Norman Steenrod and introduced what are now called the Adem relations. His brother is geophysicist Julián Adem, who obtained a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1953. Julián's son is topologist Alejandro Adem. Adem became a researcher at the Mathematics Institute of UNAM (1954–1961), and then head of the Mathematics Department at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (1961–1973). He was elected to El Colegio Nacional on 4 April 1960. In 1951 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1956, Adem started the second series of the Boletín de la Sociedad Matemática Mexicana. He published several papers on algebraic topology, especially on the Steenrod squares and their relations. He also collaborated with other mathematicians, such as Samuel Gitler, John Milnor, and Raoul Bott. He was a mentor and inspiration for many young Mexican mathematicians, and helped to establish the Mexican Mathematical Society and the Latin American Mathematical Union. He died in Mexico City on 14 February 1991.