Awards

National Academies - 1947

American Association for the Advancement of Science

About Samuel Eilenberg

Samuel Eilenberg was a Polish American mathematician who made significant contributions to the fields of algebraic topology and homological algebra. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1936. He spent most of his professional career as a professor at Columbia University where he worked on the axiomatic treatment of homology theory with Norman Steenrod, leading to the famous Eilenberg-Steenrod axioms. Later in his life he focused on pure category theory, becoming one of its founders. He also contributed to automata theory and algebraic automata theory, introducing the concept of X-machine and a prime decomposition algorithm for finite state machines.