Paul Dubreil

Paul Dubreil (1904 to 1994) was a French algebraist whose research moved from the algebraic geometry of polynomial ideals to the general theory of algebraic structures, above all semigroups. Born in Le Mans, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure, was placed first in France in the 1926 Agrégation, and defended a doctoral thesis on the primary components of polynomial ideals in 1930, after a Rockefeller scholarship that took him to Emil Artin in Hamburg and Emmy Noether in Göttingen and Frankfurt. He taught at Lille and Nancy and returned to the Sorbonne in 1946, where he held the chair of arithmetic and number theory from 1954. His 1941 paper on the theory of semigroups helped make that subject a major field, and his textbook Algèbre and the later Leçons d'algèbre moderne, written with his wife, the mathematician Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin, shaped the teaching of algebra in France. He received the Grand Prix des Sciences Mathématiques of the Académie des Sciences in 1952.