Nathan Jacobson

Nathan Jacobson (5 October 1910 to 5 December 1999) was an American mathematician, born Nachman Arbiser in Warsaw, who emigrated to the United States with his family in 1918. He graduated from the University of Alabama in 1930 and received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1934 with a thesis on non-commutative polynomials and cyclic algebras, advised by Joseph Wedderburn. He taught at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Johns Hopkins University before joining Yale University in 1947, where he stayed until he retired. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, president of the American Mathematical Society from 1971 to 1973, and received its Leroy P. Steele Prize for lifetime achievement in 1998. His books include Lectures in Abstract Algebra, Lie Algebras and Basic Algebra.