ABSTRACT
The University of Chicago was founded in 1892 with substantial financial support from John D. Rockefeller. William Rainey Harper, the first president, had bold educational ideas, one of which was that the United States was ready for a primarily graduate university, not just a college with graduate school attached. Harper brought E. H. Moore from Yale to establish his department of mathematics. Moore’s graduate teaching was done in a research laboratory setting. That is, students read and presented papers from journals, usually German, and tried to develop new theorems based on them. Research in geometry at Chicago was a continuation of Wylczinski’s projective differential geometry. Moore himself was meticulous in manners and dress. L. E. Dickson’s students tended to identify themselves strongly as number theorists or algebraists. In the conventional sense Dickson was not much of a teacher.
