My early memories are for the most part happy, though I carry to this day recollections of stern discipline meted out for this or that childish crime. I suppose I was precocious, though by no means a prodigy. I learned mathematics and French with little effort. In grammar school I had a hard time with written arithmetic, though mental arithmetic and word problems were simple. At ten years of age I heard about logarithms, at thirteen about trigonometric functions. I was an insufferable child. I had - and still suffer from - a terrible habit of mouthing off.

I had a marvellous mathematics teacher at Principia, Paul C Dietz. He gave me my head and the run of his exiguous mathematical library. I read trigonometry on my own, ditto Euclid (I loved ruler-and-compass constructions), built models of the regular solids, wrote out on tape an estimate of $1200!$, found in Thornton C Frye's probability text, and enjoyed wielding a Keuffel and Esser log log duplex sliderule, which I still have. Of course, it is only an antique now. I had a fine teacher of French at Principia, Moniseur Robbins. He gave me a good start in French, and turned me loose to read 'Les Misérables' on my own: this was my first experience of reading a serious book in a foreign tongue. The Latin teacher at Principia was a Mrs Semple, a lady of the old school. We learned our Latin from her and much more about what the Germans called 'Umgang mit Menschen' Ⓣ.

... was founded in 1929 in Glen Arbor, Michigan by Skipper and Cora Beals and Major and Helen Huey as a for-profit college-preparatory school for students who wanted to learn in a Christian Science community.

Sixteen boys from high schools and private schools in the Middle Western and Southern states have been selected from among more than three hundred candidates in the area for scholarships to enter Harvard College this fall. The awards total $5,900. The boys, who were school leaders in scholarship and class activities, were chosen from an area including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee. The scholarships announced today went to ... Edwin Hewitt, of 5016 Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Ill., Leelanau School, Glen Arbor, Michigan.

My six years at Harvard were happy. I melted into the crowd, no longer an underage, undersized misfit. The mathematics faculty was awe-inspiring. George David Birkhoff, an Olympian figure, was also dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. William Caspar Graustein was a dignified man who always wore black three-piece suits. Edward Vermilye Huntington was an elderly scholar, plainly not part of the power structure. Joseph Leonard Walsh was greatly respected for his flawless lectures, though not for the Walsh-Rademacher functions: we had not heard of them. The younger faculty included David Vernon Widder, Saunders Mac Lane, Garrett Birkhoff, Willard van Orman Quine [I think he was in the Philosophy Department: he gave brilliant courses on mathematical logic], and Marshall Harvey Stone.

The writer is enormously indebted to Professor M H Stone for guidance in research preliminary to the preparation of this dissertation.

The present paper is concerned with the problem of determining under what conditions a topological space can be resolved into two complementary sets each of which is dense in the given space. A space admitting such a resolution is said to be 'resolvable'; a space (satisfying a certain restriction to be specified below) which cannot be so resolved is said to be 'irresolvable'. Several of the techniques made use of in obtaining a partial answer to this question have applications to other topological problems. We shall indicate such applications where they occur.

The principal construction, indeed, utilised in producing irresolvable topological spaces is a special case of an operation to which any topological space may be subjected and which we have named topological expansion. The first chapter is accordingly devoted to the development of a theory of such expansions. We investigate properties of spaces which are preserved under arbitrary expansions, giving in this connection a separation axiom of peculiar interest first stated by Urysohn. In considering various types of expansions, we prove the existence of a particular expansion enjoying a number of curious properties. This expansion, called a maximal expansion, is essential in the construction of irresolvable spaces. We also consider various properties of contraction, the operation inverse to expansion.

The second chapter contains a study of irresolvable spaces. The existence of irresolvable connected $T_{1}$-spaces, totally disconnected Urysohn spaces, and totally disconnected completely regular spaces is proved directly from the expansion theory. Some irresolvable spaces enjoy a very strong disconnectivity property, which we investigate in detail.

In the final chapter, it is shown that, metric spaces, bicompact Hausdorff spaces, spaces satisfying the first countability axiom of Hausdorff, and various other special spaces are all resolvable. We also obtain a reduction showing that only $T_{1}$-spaces, and in fact only bicompact $T_{1}$-spaces, need be considered in dealing with the resolution problem.

Mr and Mrs Edward T Blanchard of Belmont, announce the engagement of their daughter, Miss Carol Blanchard, to Edwin Hewitt of Cambridge, son of Mr and Mrs Irenaeus Hewitt of Chicago, Illinois. Miss Blanchard is now a junior in the School of English at Simmons College. Mr Hewitt was graduated from Harvard in 1940, where he received his master's degree in 1941 and his Ph.D. in 1942. He is now on special duty abroad for the United States Army Air Forces.

There was a galaxy of eminences at the Institute for Advanced Study: Albert Einstein, Carl Ludwig Siegel, John von Neumann (who was around only part of the time) Hermann Weyl, Kurt Gödel, James W Alexander, Marston Morse. Richard Arens was Morse's assistant; Ernst Straus, Einstein's. At Princeton University there were Wedderburn (a man of small stature, no longer young, who wore well-cut tweeds), H P Robertson, L P Eisenhart, Salomon Bochner, Ralph Fox, Emil Artin, Solomon Lefschetz, Claude Chevalley. I was very much an 'Unterspieler' but enjoyed watching the big shots, attending their seminars, and observing their foibles. I was horrified one day to watch Chevalley bait Weyl like a terrier nipping at a water buffalo, while Weyl was trying to give a lecture on Lie groups.

I lost the military job by running afoul of the regular army colonel, Frank Fenton Reed, who was the Army liaison officer. I then found that Marshall Stone had no interest whatever in hiring me full time in his department. The man in charge of the Chicago Ordnance Research, Dean Walter Bartky, was decent enough about my plight but could do nothing to mitigate it. So I served out my one-year appointment in wretched circumstances.

I was taken with Seattle. We were welcomed by old friends from the 1920s, now rather grey at the temples. We found reasonable living accommodations. The department was a comfortable little group, which was for the most part unconcerned with research. Professors Z W Birnbaum (a Polish-born statistician), Ross A Beamont, and Herbert S Zuckerman rapidly became good friends. In particular, I found in Zuckerman a wonderful friend and collaborator. I learned most of my classical mathematics from him, a side that I had foolishly neglected in order to follow the sirens of functional analysis and set-theoretic topology. Herbert and I worked together from the autumn of 1948 until the day of his tragic and untimely death in June 1970. I am proud that my name stands alongside his, attached to now classical theorems in Diophantine approximation, the structure of semigroups, and abstract harmonic analysis.

Analysis is an immense field of mathematics, and compactness concepts and arguments enter in a great many different branches of analysis. To give a really adequate picture of the role of compactness in analysis would require in fact a survey of much of analysis: a task obviously impossible of accomplishment within the confines of a short essay, to say nothing of the limitations of the writer. After some remarks about the concept of compactness as such, therefore, we shall give examples from various parts of analysis in which compactness enters as a necessary hypothesis. These examples range from highly elementary to fairly sophisticated. They have been chosen partly to illuminate the concept and partly as important theorems of analysis. No attempt has been made to be exhaustive.

By any workable standard, Edwin Hewitt was a topological colossus. What is surprising, in view of the strong topological legacy he left us, is the paucity, in numerical terms, of his contributions. Even with a broad and generous interpretation of topology, one can classify no more than 10 of his approximately 103 research papers under that rubric. His definitive departure at the age of 35 from topological research in favour of harmonic analysis and locally compact abelian groups has been much noted and discussed by Hewitt-watchers and interested amateur historians. There were apparently two threads to this change of direction. My personal insight into the principal of these derives from the fact that Hewitt interrupted me 'sotto voce' on each of the two occasions in my life when he was in the audience and I was at the podium singing his praises. On the first of these, in October, 1982, when I introduced his Colloquium talk 'On a Theorem of F and M Riesz' at Wesleyan University, he asserted "I was prone to error in topology. I abandoned the field in 1948 plus epsilon." On the second, during my hour talk at the HewittFest at the University of Washington in 1988, when I drew special attention to the remarkable paper 'Rings of real-valued continuous functions I', he noted simply "There were errors in that paper." As to the second apparent motivation for the early career change of orientation, he declared himself publicly on the folly of his misspent youth: "I see little use for the elaborations of axiomatic topology. I had a rather severe case of the disease as a young man, but I'm happy to say it has been almost totally cured."

... was commented on by several who saw a prepublication copy of this paper. Blackwell, and Chung and Derman wrote us independently that they had become interested in the following question in connection with forthcoming publications. Is it true that the partial sums of a sequence of identically distributed independent random variables visit an arbitrary Borel set infinitely often with probability either 0 or 1? As they point out, the affirmative answer, which they had already demonstrated in certain cases, is an immediate consequence of Theorem 11.3 [the Hewitt-Savage zero-one law]. Halmos and Doob have shown us direct proofs, both of which make it plain that the theorem is close to and scarcely deeper than the ordinary 0-1 law. These proofs are, with their authors' permission, presented below.

... a construction of measures on extreme points of a convex set that is a special case of what later became Choquet theory.

"The big secret I've learned the last few years is to love the students. I wish I'd learned it earlier." The standard material of lectures in analysis which he had offered so often to utterly different listeners he laid out before his students with his characteristic verve and explored it in lively dialogue with them, memorably spiced with little stories. "The only stupid question is the one that isn't asked." His ever friendly responsiveness to students should not be misunderstood: he did not compromise in the mathematical demands he made on them. "Exercises are to a mathematician what Czerny is to a pianist."

In January, 1989, while attending a joint-meeting of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society in Phoenix, Hewitt suffered a massive stroke, which affected his speech, numerical abilities and other functions. Still, he continued to live alone and enjoyed entertaining friends. A subsequent stroke, along with other health problems, forced him into a nursing home, speechless and essentially unresponsive - the end of a good, long run.

Mathematicians are judged by their mathematics not their social graces, and some important mathematicians have been social misfits. Most, however, are rather ordinary people, socially. And a few are even very adept socially, collecting large numbers of friends, collaborators and pleasant adventures while still doing important mathematics. Edwin Hewitt is in this last group. His life ... shows that it is possible to enjoy life, enjoy people, and also enjoy and do first-rate mathematics.