ABSTRACT
During the war, Stone was engaged in some cloak-and-dagger operations in India. He had been active in Harvard mathematics, but evidently felt that the Harvard administration was both too conservative and too centralized to be aware of the growing needs of mathematics. Put differently, Stone foresaw that with the end of the war and with the many talented European mathematicians now sheltered in the United States, there was a real window of opportunity to bring about a major advance in American mathematics. In the end, he was persuaded that Chicago could be an ideal location for such a mathematical renewal, so he resigned from Harvard and began to seek mathematicians to bring to the new venture at Chicago.
