Nathan Jacobson
Nathan Jacobson ( born October 5, 1910 in Warsaw, † December 5, 1999 in Hamden, Connecticut) was an American mathematician who worked on algebra.
Biography
Jacobson was of Polish Jewish origin and emigrated with his parents in 1918 from Poland to the United States a. He first lived in Nashville, where his father had a small shop, and then in Birmingham (Alabama ), where he went to school. From 1926 he studied at the University of Alabama (first with the intention of becoming a lawyer, after visiting mathematics courses to him, however, was equal to an assistantship offered ), made there in 1930 his bachelor's degree and received his doctorate in 1934 with Joseph Wedderburn at Princeton University (Non commutative polynomials and cyclic algebras ). 1934/35 he was in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1935, he once more visited Europe, where he saw many of his relatives for the last time. 1935/36, he taught at Bryn Mawr College as the successor of Emmy Noether, whose lecture on class field theory he had heard in Princeton in the spring of 1935. 1936/37, he was with a grant from the National Research Council at the University of Chicago with Abraham Adrian Albert and Leonard Dickson. 1937 to 1943 he was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was Associate Professor in 1941. 1943 to 1947 he was at Johns Hopkins University, and from 1947 at Yale University, which had just relaxed its restrictive policy regarding the employment of Jews and where he remained until his retirement in 1981. From 1949 he was a professor there, from 1963 " Henry Ford II Professor ". 1951/52 and 1957/58 he was a visiting professor in Paris, the first time as a Guggenheim Fellow. In 1956 he was at the University of California, Berkeley and 1964 /65, Chicago and Japan.
Jacobson was primarily for his work in the theory of rings known ( Jacobson radical density set of Jacobson ) and on Lie algebras and nonassociative algebras as Jordan algebras. He has also written numerous algebra textbooks.
Jacobson was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1971 to 1973 he was president of the American Mathematical Society ( AMS). In 1998 he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. 1972 to 1974 he was vice-president of the International Mathematical Union. He returned with the other Vice President Lev Pontryagin a heated argument about it to allow Jewish mathematicians from the Soviet Union visiting congresses. Pontryagin described him as " aggressive Zionists ," to which Jacobson answered in the Notices of the AMS 1980. From 1972 he was an honorary member of the London Mathematical Society.
He was married in 1942 to the mathematician Florence Dorfman, who had studied with Albert, her doctorate gave up after marriage with Albert, but published together with her husband nor a job.
His doctoral include Charles W. Curtis, George Seligman, Eugene Schenkman, Craig Huneke, Georgia Benkart, Kevin McCrimmon, David Saltman, John Robert Faulkner and Mary Wonenburger.
Writings
- Collected Mathematical Papers, 3 vols, 1989
- Basic algebra. Freeman, San Francisco 1974
- Lectures in Abstract Algebra. 3 vols, Van Nostrand 1951, 1953, 1964, reprint by Springer, 1975 ( Vol.1 Basic concepts, Vol.2 Linear Algebra, Vol.3 Theory of Galois fields and theory )
- Structure of Rings. AMS 1956
- The theory of ring. 1943
- Lie Algebras. Interscience 1962
- Exceptional Lie Algebras. Dekker 1971
- Structure and Representation of Jordan Algebras. AMS 1968
- PI - Algebras. An Introduction. Springer 1975