Nathan Jacobson
Yale University
October 5, 1910 - December 5, 1999
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Scientific Discipline: Mathematics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1954)
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Nathan Jacobson contributed greatly to the fields of ring theory and nonassociative algebras, especially Lie algebras. He focused much of his research on deep-structure theory for rings, lending his name to the Jacobson radical, which describes where the maximum ideals intersect in a ring.
Jacobson attended the University of Alabama and earned his doctorate in mathematics for his dissertation, Non-commutative Polynomials and Cyclic Algebras, at Princeton University in 1934. During his academic career he taught and researched at a number of universities, including Bryn Mawr College, the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society and vice president of the International Mathematical Union.
