page_title: Hassler Whitney
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Hassler Whitney / Biography / Life
caption_attribution_description: Depicted place&#58; Cannon Mountain
context_page_description: Hassler Whitney was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, characteristic classes, and geometric integration theory.
context_section_description: Hassler Whitney was born on March 23, 1907, in New York City, where his father Edward Baldwin Whitney was the First District New York Supreme Court judge. His mother, A. Josepha Newcomb Whitney, was an artist and active in politics. His paternal grandfather was William Dwight Whitney, professor of Ancient Languages at Yale University, linguist, and Sanskrit scholar. Whitney was the great grandson of Connecticut Governor and US Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, and the great-great-grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman. His maternal grandparents were astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb (1835-1909), a Steeves descendant, and Mary Hassler Newcomb, granddaughter of the first superintendent of the Coast Survey Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler. His great uncle Josiah Whitney was the first to survey Mount Whitney.
  He married three times: his first wife was Margaret R. Howell, married on the 30 May 1930. They had three children, James Newcomb, Carol and Marian. After his first divorce, on January 16, 1955 he married Mary Barnett Garfield. He and Mary had two daughters, Sarah Newcomb and Emily Baldwin. Finally, Whitney divorced his second wife and married Barbara Floyd Osterman on 8 February 1986.
  Whitney and his first wife Margaret made an innovative decision in 1939 that influenced the history of modern architecture in New England, when they commissioned the architect Edwin B. Goodell, Jr. to design a new residence for their family in Weston, Massachusetts. They purchased a rocky hillside site on a historic road, next door to another International Style house by Goodell from several years earlier, designed for Richard and Caroline Field.
  Distinctively featuring flat roofs, flush wood siding, and corner windows—all of which were unusual architectural elements at the time—the Whitney House was also a creative response to its site, in that it placed the main living spaces one floor above ground level, with large banks of windows opening to the south sun and to views of the beautiful property. The Whitney House survives today, along with the Field House, more than 75 years following its original construction; both are contributing structures in the historic Sudbury Road Area.
  Throughout his life he pursued two particular hobbies with excitement: music and mountain-climbing. An accomplished player of the violin and the viola, Whitney played with the Princeton Musical Amateurs. He would run outside, 6 to 12 miles every other day. As an undergraduate, with his cousin Bradley Gilman, Whitney made the first ascent of the Whitney–Gilman ridge on Cannon Mountain, New Hampshire in 1929. It was the hardest and most famous rock climb in the East. He was a member of the Swiss Alpine Society and the Yale Mountaineering Society (the precursor to the Yale Outdoors Club) and climbed most of the mountain peaks in Switzerland.
caption: The Whitney–Gilman ridge on Cannon Mountain
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