Samuel Eilenberg

Samuel Eilenberg
Samuel Eilenberg (1970)
Born	(1913-09-30)September 30, 1913 Warsaw, Poland, Russian Empire
Died	January 30, 1998(1998-01-30) (aged 84) New York City, United States
Nationality	Polish, American
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	University of Warsaw
Known for	Eilenberg–Steenrod axioms Eilenberg swindle
Awards	Wolf Prize (1986) Leroy P. Steele Prize (1987)
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Columbia University
Doctoral advisor	Kazimierz Kuratowski Karol Borsuk
Doctoral students	Jonathan Beck David Buchsbaum Martin Golumbic Daniel Kan William Lawvere Ramaiyengar Sridharan Myles Tierney

Samuel Eilenberg (September 30, 1913 – January 30, 1998) was a Polish-born American mathematician who co-founded category theory with Saunders Mac Lane.

Biography

He was born in Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland to a Jewish family and died in New York City, United States, where he had spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University.

He earned his Ph.D. from University of Warsaw in 1936. His thesis advisor was Karol Borsuk. His main interest was algebraic topology. He worked on the axiomatic treatment of homology theory with Norman Steenrod (whose names the Eilenberg–Steenrod axioms bear), and on homological algebra with Saunders Mac Lane. In the process, Eilenberg and Mac Lane created category theory.

Eilenberg was a member of Bourbaki and with Henri Cartan, wrote the 1956 book Homological Algebra, which became a classic.

Later in life he worked mainly in pure category theory, being one of the founders of the field. The Eilenberg swindle (or telescope) is a construction applying the telescoping cancellation idea to projective modules.

Eilenberg contributed to automata theory and algebraic automata theory. In particular, he introduced a model of computation called X-machine and a new prime decomposition algorithm for finite state machines in the vein of Krohn–Rhodes theory.

Eilenberg was also a prominent collector of Asian art. His collection mainly consisted of small sculptures and other artifacts from India, Indonesia, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Central Asia. In 1991-1992, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged an exhibition from more than 400 items that Eilenberg had donated to the museum, entitled The Lotus Transcendent: Indian and Southeast Asian Art From the Samuel Eilenberg Collection. In reciprocity, the Metropolitan Museum of Art donated substantially to the endowment of the Samuel Eilenberg Visiting Professorship in Mathematics at Columbia University.

Selected publications

• Eilenberg, Samuel (1974). Automata, Languages and Machines, Volume A. ISBN 0-12-234001-9.
• Eilenberg, Samuel (1976). Automata, Languages and Machines, Volume B. ISBN 0-12-234002-7.
• Eilenberg, Samuel; Ganea, Tudor (1957). "On the Lusternik-Schnirelmann category of abstract groups". Annals of Mathematics. 2nd Series. 65 (3): 517–518. JSTOR 1970062. MR 0085510.
• Eilenberg, Samuel; Mac Lane, Saunders (1945). "Relations between homology and homotopy groups of spaces". Annals of Mathematics. 46: 480–509. doi:10.2307/1969165.
• Eilenberg, Samuel; Mac Lane, Saunders (1950). "Relations between homology and homotopy groups of spaces. II". Annals of Mathematics. 51: 514–533. doi:10.2307/1969365.
• Eilenberg, Samuel; Moore, John C. (1962), "Limits and spectral sequences", Topology, 1 (1): 1–23, doi:10.1016/0040-9383(62)90093-9, ISSN 0040-9383
• Eilenberg, Samuel; Niven, Ivan (1944). "The "fundamental theorem of algebra" for quaternions". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 50 (4): 246–248. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1944-08125-1. MR 0009588.
• Eilenberg, Samuel; Steenrod, Norman E. (1945). "Axiomatic approach to homology theory". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 31 (4): 117–120. doi:10.1073/pnas.31.4.117. PMC 1078770. PMID 16578143.
• Samuel Eilenberg & Norman E. Steenrod (1952), Foundations of algebraic topology, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. xv+328 pp.

See also

• Stefan Banach
• Stanislaw Ulam
• Eilenberg–Ganea conjecture
• Eilenberg–Ganea theorem
• Eilenberg–MacLane space
• Eilenberg–Montgomery fixed point theorem
• Eilenberg–Moore spectral sequence

External links

• Samuel Eilenberg at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Samuel Eilenberg", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
• Eilenberg's biography − from the National Academies Press, by Hyman Bass, Henri Cartan, Peter Freyd, Alex Heller and Saunders Mac Lane.