The obituary of Charles Leonard Bouton

There's an interesting article in the September 2009 issue of the AMS Notices with title "Bocher, Osgood, and Ascendance of American Mathematics at Harvard" by Steve Batterson.

Batterson's article briefly mentions Charles L. Bouton, the author of  Nim, A Game with a Complete Mathematical Theory, Ann. Math. Princeton 3, 35-39, 1901-1902.   This is a seminal paper in combinatorial game theory.  I've long wanted to know some details of Bouton's life, but hadn't managed to turn up much in sporadic attempts to locate information about him.

So, today I sent a message to Batterson and he pointed out Bouton's two page obituary notice, which appeared in the March, 1922 Bulletin of the AMS pp. 123-124, and was apparently put together by William F Osgood, Julian L. Coolidge, and George H. Chase.

So, I Googled that, and discovered that projecteuclid has the obituary online as a PDF.

It's a fascinating document, particularly its last paragraph, which I interpret as a veiled description of Bouton's suffering from a mental illness.

[ Michael Albert comments (at Facebook):    Yes, particularly given the two earlier references to "sanity" ]

Comments

[themckayguy]

Thank you very much for posting this. I am very pleased to have read this.