Abraham Seidenberg

Abraham Seidenberg was an American mathematician, born on June 2, 1916 in Washington D.C. He graduated from the University of Maryland in 1937 and completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1943 under Oscar Zariski, with a thesis on valuation ideals in rings of polynomials in two variables. He became an instructor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1945, reached the rank of full professor in 1958 and retired in 1987. He was known for his research in commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, differential algebra and the history of mathematics, and with Irvin Cohen he published Prime ideals and integral dependence, which greatly simplified the existing proofs of the going-up and going-down theorems. He died in Milan on May 3, 1988, in the midst of a series of lectures at the University of Milan.