Irvin S. Cohen

Irvin Sol Cohen was an American mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on local rings and was a student of Oscar Zariski at Johns Hopkins University. In his thesis he proved the Cohen structure theorem for complete Noetherian local rings, in 1946 he proved the unmixedness theorem for power series rings, and as a result Cohen-Macaulay rings are named after him and Francis Sowerby Macaulay. In 1950 he proved that a commutative ring whose prime ideals are all finitely generated is a Noetherian ring. With Abraham Seidenberg he published the Cohen-Seidenberg theorems, also known as the going-up and going-down theorems, and one of his doctoral students was R. Duncan Luce. He was born in 1917 and died unexpectedly on February 14, 1955.