Zorn

Max Zorn

Born: 6 June 1906 in Germany
Died: 9 March 1993

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Zorn received his doctorate from Hamburg in 1930, his doctoral work being supervised by Artin. He was appointed to Halle but, in 1933, he was forced to leave Germany because of the Nazi policies.

Zorn emigrated to the USA and worked at Yale from 1934 to 1936 where he established 'Zorn's Lemma'. Zorn then moved to the University of California where he remained until 1946 when he became professor at Indiana.

As well as his well known work in infinite set theory, Zorn worked on topology and algebra. One of his early results was to prove the uniqueness of the Cayley numbers, he showed that it was the only alternative, quadratic, real nonassociative algebra without zero divisors. Herstein was one of his students.

References:

  1. J Ewing, Max Zorn 1906-1993, Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 40 (1993), 640. 
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