Elias Albert This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. Americans For Jews - Abraham Adrian Albert

   www.americansforjews.org/modul - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/22/2004   Last Visited: 3/16/2005

   Albert, Abraham Adrian (9 Nov. 1905-6 June 1972), mathematician, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Elias Albert, a retail merchant and manufacturer, and Fannie Fradkin.
   ...
   Elias, who had left Russia initially for England, took the last name Albert before his marriage, in deference to the British prince consort; his original family name is unknown. In 1922 Adrian, as he was called, entered the University of Chicago, from which he earned a bachelor's degree in 1926. He stayed on at Chicago for his graduate training, hardly a surprise in light of his already pronounced mathematical talents and the fact that the mathematics program there was among the best in the nation at the time. After only one year, he received an M.S. in mathematics under the guidance of America's premier algebraist, Leonard Eugene Dickson, and in 1928 Albert was awarded a Ph.D. for his work, also under Dickson, on a certain class of associative division algebras. Albert married Frieda Davis in 1927 while engaged in his doctoral research; the couple had three children.
   ...
   On the strength of the results presented in his doctoral work, Albert won a coveted National Research Council Fellowship for the 1928-1929 academic year, which he spent at Princeton University.
   ...
   Albert followed the postdoctoral year in Princeton with two years (1929-1931) as an instructor at Columbia University before returning to his alma mater in 1931 as an assistant professor of mathematics. At Chicago he rose through the academic ranks, becoming associate professor in 1937, professor in 1941, and Eliakim Hastings Moore Distinguished Professor in 1960; he retained the last position until his death.
   
   Albert's first year on the Chicago faculty, however, brought with it perhaps his greatest mathematical disappointment. Having continued in the vein of his doctoral research, Albert had focused his attention on the main outstanding problem in the theory of associative algebras, namely, the determination of all finite-dimensional division algebras over the field of rational numbers. In the process Albert found himself in a mathematical race against some of the stiffest German competitors.
   ...
   Hasse quickly sought to remedy this situation by coauthoring with Albert an account of the history of the result's proof with due acknowledgment and recognition of Albert's work ("A Determination of All Normal Division Algebras over an Algebraic Number Field," Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 34 [1932]: 722-26).
   ...
   Fortunately for his career, Albert did not allow this setback to impede his mathematical progress for long.
   ...
   With U.S. entry into World War II, Albert, like so many others in mathematics and the sciences, joined the war effort on the home front. He participated in the Applied Mathematics Group at Northwestern University, a branch of the National Defense Research Council's Applied Mathematics Panel charged with compiling mathematical tables, and served as that group's associate director in 1945. Albert also became interested in the mathematization of cryptography and gave an invited hour-address on that subject at the AMS's meeting in Manhattan, Kansas, in November 1941.
   ...
   In 1947, in an algebraic tour de force, Albert adapted the theorems and methods of the structure theory of associative algebras to determine the structure theory of the nonassociative, Jordan algebras.
   
   After the war, Albert continued his research in nonassociative algebras but expended increasing energies on mathematics policymaking at the national and international levels. Beginning in 1943, he served as the editor of two influential publications in the field, the Bulletin of the AMS and the Transactions of the AMS. He would hold both positions until 1949. Also in the late 1940s, he worked within the context of the AMS to set the budget for mathematics within what would become, in 1950, the National Science Foundation, and he insured that this budget did not slight mathematics at the expense of other, more costly sciences. From January 1955 to June 1957, he chaired the influential AMS Committee on a Survey of Training and Research Potential in the Mathematical Sciences, which subsequently became known as the Albert Committee. He served as AMS vice president in 1957-1958 and as its president in 1965-1966. In 1970 Albert was also elected to a four-year term as vice president of the International Mathematical Union. His death, in Chicago, prevented him from serving out the term, however.
   
   Albert, or A-cubed as many mathematicians affectionately called him, was an internationally renowned mathematician who made his principal contributions to the areas of associative and nonassociative algebras and Riemann matrices. He shared his talent and enthusiasm for mathematics with twenty-nine doctoral students whom he genuinely viewed as part of his family. He also worked tirelessly to establish mathematics on an equal footing with the other sciences in a postwar era characterized by governmental and corporate funding for basic scientific research.