I was a student in a graduate course of Wilder's in 1950 or so,
when the AMS volume was in press. Wilder complained that each set of
corrections he sent back to the printer returned corrected but with new
errors, in a plainly non-convergent process, and that he had decided that
the was to stop it was, rather than correcting the typesetters, to try to
prove the printer's theorems.
While I am (or was) too young to know many details, I believe
Wilder's notable achievements included the attraction to Michigan of a
galaxy of topologists, including Sammy Eilenberg before the war (Eilenberg
got out of Europe just in time), Samelson, Steenrod, and Raoul Bott. I
don't know why he should have been "drummed out" of anything, since he
himself taught an R.L. Moore - style course for undergraduates, in which
he gave out a paced list of axioms and definitions and required the
students to prove (at the blackboard, too, when their turn came) the
theorems he also fed out gradually as the semester progressed. Gail
Young, another Moore topologist at Michigan, also taught a course partly
in the same manner. I don't remember the axiom system Wilder used as I
never took his course, but Young's were axioms for the closed line
interval as an ordered continuum with end points. ("non-cut-points")
Ralph A. Raimi Tel. 716 275 4429 or (home) 716 244 9368
Dept. of Mathematics FAX 716 244 6631
University of Rochester Webpage http://www.math.rochester.edu/u/rarm
Rochester, NY 14627 (Webpage contains links to papers)