Cyrus Colton MacDuffee

Cyrus Colton MacDuffee (1895 to 1961) was an American mathematician from Oneida, New York, who became a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin. He wrote a number of influential research papers in abstract algebra, and his books include The Theory of Matrices of 1933, An Introduction to Abstract Algebra, Vectors and Matrices and Theory of Equations. He earned his B.S. at Colgate University in 1917 and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1922 with a thesis on nonassociative algebras under Leonard E. Dickson, taught at Princeton and Ohio State, and joined Wisconsin in 1935, where he chaired the department from 1951 to 1956. He served on the Council of the American Mathematical Society, edited its Transactions, presided over the Mathematical Association of America, and guided thirty doctoral students, among them D. R. Fulkerson and H. J. Ryser. The Latimer-MacDuffee theorem carries his name.