Wells taught there for about 35 years, with sabbatical interruptions at
ETH Zürich (in mathematics) and
Oxford University (in computing science). He had a research career in mathematics in
finite fields,
group theory and
category theory. In the last twenty years of this life he had also been interested in the
language of mathematics and related issues concerning teaching and communicating abstract ideas.
Publications
In addition to his scholarly publications, Wells produced A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse,[4][5] which is a dictionary of words and concepts used by mathematicians that are easily misunderstood, explained in a way that laypersons can also appreciate.
As a life-long
shape note singer, in 2002 Wells jointly compiled a tunebook called Oberlin Harmony,[6] which included some of his own compositions.
^Charles Wells, Chloe Maher, Oberlin Harmony (2002, Oberlin, Ohio). Incomplete table of contents given in:
"Oberlin Harmony". Hymnary.org. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
^Pitts, A. (1991), "Review of Toposes, Triples and Theories by Barr, M., & Wells, C.", Journal of Symbolic Logic, 56 (1): 340–341,
doi:
10.2307/2274934,
JSTOR2274934