Norman Steenrod

Norman Earl Steenrod (1910 to 1971) was an American mathematician best known for his work in algebraic topology and counted among the founders of homological algebra. Born in Dayton, Ohio, he finished school in nine years, worked as a tool designer to fund his studies, and studied at Miami University and the University of Michigan, where Raymond Wilder's topology course set his direction. He took his doctorate at Princeton under Solomon Lefschetz, taught at Chicago from 1939 and at Michigan from 1942, and returned to Princeton in 1947, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He introduced the Steenrod algebra and Steenrod squares in work on classifying maps into spheres, wrote the classic book The Topology of Fibre Bundles in 1951, and with Samuel Eilenberg wrote Foundations of Algebraic Topology in 1952. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and gave the American Mathematical Society Colloquium lectures in 1957.