Nathan Jacobson (1910–1999), Volume 47, Number 9

When a colleague was explaining how a mathematician can be recognized to have reached the summit of recognition by his peers, he used the metaphor, " He has become part of the furniture. " That is, his contributions have become a part of the daily vocabulary and working equipment of many of us. Such is certainly the status of Nathan Jacobson. As my fellow authors will show more specifically, he earned his dominance by recasting whole theories of algebraic systems and by insisting on the module-theoretic viewpoint in their study. His expository and research monographs and his ambitious textbooks have indebted a worldwide community to him for strong and articulate leadership. The authors use this opportunity to remind us of some of the ways his ideas have shaped our thought. " Jake " , the name all used, died on December 5, 1999, at the age of eighty-nine. Extensive autobiographical material is to be found in the " Personal History and Commentary " that he wrote in seven installments in his Collected Mathematical Papers [B14], published in three volumes by Birkhäuser in 1989. I recommend these passages both for more details on his personal life and for his comments on the development of his mathematical work. In this segment of the present article I provide a sketch of his career. His " official " birth date was September 8, 1910, but Jake maintained that the correct one was October 5. His father emigrated to Nashville, Tennessee, when Jake was five, leaving the family in Poland until he was well enough established to bring them over. The First World War was nearing its end when Jake, his brother, and his mother were able to board a Dutch ship with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. After a few months in the rear of his father's Nashville grocery, Jake and his family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and then, in 1923, to Columbus, Mississippi. Jake graduated from the S. D. Lee High School in Columbus in 1926. He entered the University of Alabama that fall, intending to follow a maternal uncle into law. While following a pre-law program, he took all mathematics courses available. The notice of his professors was attracted to the extent that in his junior year he was offered a teaching assistantship in mathematics. Two of these professors, Fred Lewis and William P. Ott, were always remembered fondly as …