Francis Macaulay

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Francis Sowerby Macaulay (born February 11, 1862 in Witney , † February 9, 1937 in Cambridge ) was an English mathematician who dealt with commutative algebra.

Macaulay was the son of a Methodist pastor, visited the Kingswood School in Bath and started in 1879, at St John's College of Cambridge University to study. After graduation he became a school teacher, first at his old school in Bath, then in 1885 at St Paul's School in London . His students included George Neville Watson and John Edensor Littlewood , who reported on his teacher in his Mathematicians Miscellany . Littlewood mentions that 41 scholarship holders emerged from his classes, including 4 senior Wranglers in Cambridge. In 1911 he retired, which he later spent in Cambridge.

He was co-editor of the Mathematical Gazette, in which he also published regularly.

Macaulay published 14 papers on algebra and algebraic geometry. Independently of Emanuel Lasker (1905), he showed in 1915 the prime ideal decomposition of an ideal in a polynomial ring. In 1916 his The Algebraic Theory of Modular Systems appeared on the ideal theory of polynomial rings. In England, the influence of his work was little at that time, but it was taken up, for example, in Germany by Wolfgang Krull and was important for the development of commutative algebra.

In 1928 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Cohen-Macaulay rings were named after Macaulay and Irvin Cohen by Oscar Zariski and Pierre Samuel . The Macaulay computer algebra system is named after him.

His brother also studied mathematics at Cambridge and became a professor in Australia.

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