Samuel Eilenberg

Samuel Eilenberg (30 September 1913 to 30 January 1998) was a Polish-American mathematician who co-founded category theory, with Saunders Mac Lane, and homological algebra. He was born in Warsaw, in the Kingdom of Poland, to a Jewish family and spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1936, with a thesis on topological applications of maps onto a circle, under Kazimierz Kuratowski and Karol Borsuk. His main body of work was in algebraic topology, including the Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms with Norman Steenrod, and he was a member of Bourbaki and with Henri Cartan wrote the 1956 book Homological Algebra.