Francis Sowerby Macaulay

Francis Sowerby Macaulay was an English mathematician who made significant contributions to algebraic geometry. He was born in Witney on 11 February 1862 and died in Cambridge on 9 February 1937. He was educated at Kingswood School and graduated with distinction from St John's College, Cambridge, and then taught the top mathematics class at St Paul's School in London from 1885 to 1911, where his pupils included J. E. Littlewood and G. N. Watson. He is best known for his 1916 book The Algebraic Theory of Modular Systems, modular systems being an old term for ideals, a work that greatly influenced the later course of commutative algebra. Several things carry his name, among them Cohen-Macaulay rings, Macaulay duality, the Macaulay resultant and the Macaulay and Macaulay2 computer algebra systems. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1928.