Saunders MacLane

Biography of Saunders Mac Lane

Saunders Mac Lane was born on August 4, 1909 in Connecticut. He studied at Yale University and then at the University of Chicago and at Göttingen, where he received the D.Phil. in 1934. He has tought at Harvard, Cornell and the University of Chicago.

Mac Lane's initial research was in logic and in algebraic number theory (valuation theory). With Samuel Eilenberg he published fifteen papers on algebraic topology. A number of them involved the initial steps in the cohomology of groups and in other aspects of homological algebra - as well as the discovery of category theory. His famous and undergraduate textbook Survey of modern algebra, written jointly with G. Birkhoff, has remained in print for over 50 years. Mac Lane is also the author of several other highly successful books.