Max Zorn

Max Zorn was a German mathematician, born in Krefeld on 6 June 1906, who died in Bloomington, Indiana, on 9 March 1993. He is best known for Zorn's lemma, which is equivalent to the Axiom of Choice. He studied at Hamburg University under Emil Artin and was Artin's second doctoral student, receiving his Ph.D. in April 1930 for a thesis on alternative algebras. He was appointed an assistant at Halle, but he left Germany in 1933 because of the Nazi policies, although he was not Jewish. In the United States he held a Sterling Fellowship at Yale University from 1934 to 1936, and it was during these years that he proposed the lemma that carries his name. He then moved to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he remained until 1946 and where Herstein was one of his doctoral students.