by Rob Kirby
Marty Scharlemann was born on 6 December 1948 on an air force base in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
His father, Martin H. Scharlemann, born in Illinois in 1910, had a Ph.D. in classical languages from Washington University in St. Louis and was a chaplain in the Air Force during World War II, and later rose to the rank of Brigadier General — not a usual ascent for a chaplain! Marty’s grandfather, Ernst Scharlemann, was also a Lutheran minister as well as a one-time politician who ran for Senator while living in Minnesota. He lost, but he persuaded his flock to vote Farmer–Labor in a crucial election, and his district was rewarded with one of the first four-lane divided highways in the US. It only ran for 1.5 miles, and has since been allowed to degenerate to a mere two lanes as something of a “road to nowhere”. Ernst had emigrated from Schleswig-Holstein, just south of Denmark, and settled in a German speaking colony in the US. Marty’s father grew up speaking German and learned English as a second language. After World War II he became a professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis where Marty grew up. So, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Marty grew up on the grounds of a Lutheran seminary where his father was a professor.
In 1938 Marty’s father married Dorothy Hoyer, the daughter of a professor at the same seminary whose family had emigrated from Germany before the American Civil War. They had four children: Edith who taught in a junior college; Ted who is a physicist at Livermore Lab; Marty, the mathematician; and John who became a Lutheran minister.
Marty went to Lutheran parochial schools and had excellent teachers. He left high-school after three years (having satisfied all but his PE requirements!) and matriculated at Princeton University in 1965. There he intended to major in physics until in 1966–67 he took an honors calculus course using Michael Spivak’s book Calculus on Manifolds; Dennis Sullivan was such an inspiring teacher that Marty switched from physics to math.
His junior thesis was advised by Marshall Cohen (who later spent a long career in topology at Cornell). Ralph Fox was Marty’s adviser for his senior thesis. Fox was giving a course in shape theory and suggested that topic to Marty and told him to read Steenrod’s book [◊] on fiber bundles.
After a while, Fox mentioned a problem that he had in mind for Marty. It was known that the covering spaces for \( X \) were determined by the shape of \( X \). (Here \( X \) is a separable metric space in \( \mathbb{R}^N \) and its shape is the inverse limit of neighborhoods of \( X \subset \mathbb{R}^N \).) Fox asked Marty to prove the same for fiber bundles over \( X \).
Late in the year Fox asked Marty how he was doing and Marty said he had a counterexample. Fox asked what the group (of the bundle) was and Marty, thinking multiplicatively, said the positive rationals. Fox thought additively and said, “But that’s not a group!”. Both momentarily wore horrified expressions.
Marty went off to Berkeley in 1969 and took his Ph.D. quals in 1970. The qual system at Berkeley then was to take three one-hour oral exams on a Saturday. Marty did well in topology and analysis but not algebra. The disappointed examiners asked if it had been hard to study in the wake of Nixon’s Cambodian invasion. Marty said, “Yes!” (When they throw you a lifeline, grab it!)
In 1971, Marty asked Emery Thomas to be his Ph.D. adviser, but Thomas was going on sabbatical. So he asked Tom Farrell who’d taught a terrific course, but it turned out Farrell was leaving Berkeley. Then he tried Lowell Jones, but same problem. Finally he heard that I was coming to Berkeley in 1971–72 so he waited until the first day I arrived in January 1972, and I said yes.
During Marty’s second year, he met Barbara Wagner, a senior in psychology, at folk dancing. They married in 1974. She got a teaching credential at Berkeley and later worked in the California Employment Development Department. They have a daughter, Tess. She is a Ph.D. economist who has worked with the Council of Economic Advisers, the Treasury Department and now the Federal Reserve.
Marty finished his Ph.D. in 1974 with five papers, published or submitted. Probably the best of these is his paper on topological transversality in dimension four [◊] in which he gets as close as was possible at that time to showing via transversality that there is a topological, almost parallelizable, 4-manifold with signature 8 (this was finally achieved by Freedman in 1981).
Larry Siebenmann had visited Berkeley in summer 1973 and a collaboration with Marty led to two papers (of the aforementioned five) concerning the Hauptvermutung: [◊] and [◊]. The first shows that (avoiding dimension 4) if a homeomorphism between two smooth manifolds is a \( C^{\infty} \) map in one direction, then it is isotopic to a PL-homeomorphism. The second contains an interesting example, namely a homeomorphism from a Brieskorn–Pham manifold to \( \mathbb{RP}^5 \) which is not isotopic to a \( C^{\infty} \) homeomorphism.
While a graduate student, Marty understood Markov’s paper [◊] showing that there cannot be an algorithm which will distinguish any two closed compact PL 4-manifolds. In a recent conversation (\( \sim \)2014), Marty dredged up his recollections of 40 years earlier and I wrote up his exposition. I don’t know of any better exposition, so I include it in this volume.
Marty took a post doctoral year at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1974–75 and followed that with a year at the University of Georgia. The latter was fine mathematically, but an opportunity arose to move to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and that brought Marty and Barb to California, which they loved.
While at UCSB, Marty proved to be an excellent adviser, as seen in his list of Ph.D. students. He served with distinction as Chair of the Math Department for three years, and then for another year as interim chair. He bought a sports car, a BMW Z3, as a reward to himself for agreeing to be Chair. Later he served for three years on CAP, the campus-wide Committee on Academic Personnel, and was Chair for the last year. Within the University of California system, this committee is the most important one. He also served a term as Charges Officer at UCSB.
Marty and Bob Oliver were the founding editors of Algebraic & Geometric Topology, helping make it a great success story.
