Saunders Mac Lane
Saunders Mac Lane ( * August 4, 1909 in Taftville, Connecticut, † 14 April 2005 in San Francisco, California ) was an American mathematician. Considered together with Samuel Eilenberg as the founder of category theory.
Life
Mac Lane's father, a clergyman, died in 1924. Afterwards Mac Lane moved in with his grandparents and finished high school in 1926. From 1926 to 1930 Mac Lane studied at Yale. After completing his bachelor's degree in 1930, he received a one-year research fellowship at the University of Chicago with a master's degree in 1931. Eliakim Hastings Moore Here he met, on whose advice he went to Göttingen in 1931 for the promotion, then the center of mathematical research.
On July 19, 1933 he made his dissertation entitled Abbreviated proofs in the calculus of logic before and defended it in the viva voce on May 26, 1934 compared to Hermann Weyl and Paul Bernays. Due to the political situation in Germany Mac Lane left shortly thereafter Göttingen and went back to America. He was from 1934 to 1936 Pierce Instructor at Harvard University, 1936/37, Instructor at Cornell University and 1937/38, Instructor at the University of Chicago before 1938 a position as Assistant Professor at Harvard adopted, where he became a professor afterwards. During the Second World War taught and researched Mac Lane in applied mathematics at Columbia University in New York, where he was 1944/45, Director of the Applied Mathematics Group. He was appointed in 1947 to a professorship in Chicago. From 1963, he was there Distinguished Service Professor. In 1982 he became Professor Emeritus.
1947/48 and 1972/73 as he Guggenheim Fellow at ETH Zurich and at Columbia University was. In 1958 he was a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg and 1960 at the University of Frankfurt, 1969 Fulbright Lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra in 1969 and a visiting professor at Tulane University.
He married Osa Skotting since 1986 and had two daughters.
Work
In 1941 he published along with Garrett Birkhoff A Survey of Modern Algebra, the fast the standard textbook for algebra was.
Since 1943 he worked with Samuel Eilenberg in the field of topology, and in particular the cohomology together, and led with this one the Eilenberg - MacLane spaces. In 1945, she designed with " General Theory of Natural Equivalences " ( in Trans Amer. Math Soc., 58, 1945), the foundation of category theory.
Honors and Memberships
He was much honorary doctorates (including Harvard - an honorary MA, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Glasgow ).
MacLane was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Vice President, he was from 1973 to 1981, the Mathematical Association of America (Vice President 1948-1950 ), the American Philosophical Society (Vice President 1968-1971 ), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in their advice he was from 1981 to 1985. From 1946 to 1948 he was Vice President and 1973-1974 President of the American Mathematical Society.
1954 to 1958 he was in the Council ( Executive Committee ) of the International Mathematical Union. 1974 to 1980 he was in the National Science Board of the U.S. and from 1959 to 1962 and from 1969 to 1972 in the Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
Works
- Homology, Springer basic teachings of the mathematical sciences Volume 114 (1967)
- Garrett Birkhoff with: A Survey of Modern Algebra Macmillan, New York 1977, ISBN 0-02-310070-2.
- Mathematics Form and Function. Springer, New York, 1986, ISBN 0-387-96217-4.
- Categories for the Working Mathematician. Springer, New York 1998, ISBN 0-387-98403-8.
- With Ieke Moerdijk Sheaves in geometry and logic. A first introduction to topos theory, Universitext, Springer- Verlag, 1992, 1994