Francis Sowerby Macaulay

Francis Sowerby Macaulay ( born February 11, 1862 in Witney, † February 9, 1937 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician who worked on commutative algebra.

Macaulay was the son of a Methodist pastor, attended Kingswood School in Bath and began in 1879, at St John 's College, Cambridge University to study. After graduation, he became a school teacher, first at his old school in Bath, then in 1885 at St Paul's School in London. Among his pupils were, among others, George Neville Watson and John Edensor Littlewood, who reported in his Mathematicians Miscellany about his teacher. So Littlewood mentioned that 41 fellows emerged from his classes, including 4 Senior Wranglers at Cambridge. In 1911 he retired, he later spent in Cambridge.

He was co-editor of the Mathematical Gazette, in which he also published regularly.

Macaulay published 14 works on algebra and algebraic geometry. Regardless of Emanuel Lasker (1905 ) he showed in 1915, the prime ideal decomposition of an ideal in a polynomial ring. In 1916 he published his The Algebraic Theory of Modular Systems on the theory of ideals of polynomial rings. In England the influence of his work in his day was low, but they were taken, for example in Germany by Wolfgang Krull and were important for the development of commutative algebra.

In 1928 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Cohen- Macaulay rings were named by Oscar Zariski and Pierre Samuel by Macaulay and Irvin Cohen. The computer algebra system Macaulay is named after him.

His brother studied mathematics at Cambridge and became a professor in Australia.