Dr. Robert Lee "R.L" Moore

Moore entered the University of Texas at sixteen and came under the influence of George Bruce Halsted, an internationally known mathematician. Before Chicago he spent a year as a fellow at the university and a year teaching high school mathematics in Marshall; at Chicago he worked under Eliakim Hastings Moore, no relation. Between 1907 and 1919 he published seventeen papers, and from 1913 to 1926 he was an associate editor of the American Mathematical Society's Transactions. He edited its Colloquium Publications from 1928 to 1936. Three of his doctoral students were themselves elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

What the plaque says

Dr. Robert Lee "R.L" Moore (1882-1974) Dallas-born Robert Lee "R.L." Moore was a noted figure in the new generation of American-educated researchers of science in the early 20th century. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, earning both bachelors and masters degrees in 1901. In 1905, he graduated with a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, which had a renowned department of research mathematics. After his studies, Moore taught at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Princeton University and Northwestern University. In 1910, he married Margaret MacLellan Key, and the two moved to Philadelphia, where Dr. Moore took a position at the University of Pennsylvania. Here he developed a teaching method where he gave students assumptions and gradually introduced hypotheses which they had to prove or disprove. This pedagogy, whose roots are in the Socratic and inquiry-based models, became known as the Moore Method. In 1920, Dr. Moore started a five-decade long career as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, living in this house (originally located one block west) for most of that time. He guided forty-seven students to doctoral degrees and conducted research, including his principal work, Foundations of Point Set Theory (1932). He published over 60 papers on this topic, establishing a branch of topology. Moore was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1932) and named president of the American Mathematical Society (1937). He retired in 1969, and in 1973, the university named a newly constructed building for him (R.L. Moore Hall). Today, Dr. R.L. Moore is remembered as a prominent mathematics researcher, an influential teacher and a mentor to students who would become leading mathematics figures themselves. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Harry Ransom Center — 0.3 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.6 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Texas State Capitol — 0.9 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 0.9 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• Clara Driscoll — 0.2 mi
• Site of Edward Mandell House Home — 0.4 mi
• All Saints' Episcopal Church — 0.4 mi
• Rebecca Kilgore Stuart Red — 0.5 mi