Alfred L. Foster

Alfred Leon Foster was an American mathematician, born in New York City in 1904 and died in Berkeley in 1994, who worked on Boolean rings and algebras. He took his bachelor's degree at the California Institute of Technology in 1926 and his doctorate at Princeton, where his thesis Formal Logic in Finite Terms was submitted in 1930, and he spent a year of postdoctoral study at Gottingen. He joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1934, one of the first two appointments made by Griffith Evans when he set out to build a first-class mathematics centre, and served there until his retirement in 1971. His dissertation and first papers were in mathematical logic, from which he moved to the theory of Boolean algebras and Boolean rings and so to algebra, culminating in his 1946 paper The Theory of Boolean-like Rings. He also developed a theory of n-ality for certain rings and was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1932.