Nathan Jacobson

Jacobson was a leading algebraist whose work on rings, Lie algebras and Jordan algebras shaped twentieth-century abstract algebra; the Jacobson radical and Jacobson density theorem bear his name, and his textbooks trained generations of mathematicians. He spent much of his career at Yale and served as president of the American Mathematical Society. Born into a Jewish family in Warsaw, he emigrated with his family to the United States as a young child.