Career
Mac Lane was christened "Leslie Saunders MacLane", but "Leslie" fell into disuse because his parents, Donald MacLane and Winifred Saunders, came to dislike it. He began inserting a space into his surname because his first wife found it difficult to type the name without a space.
Mac Lane earned a BA from Yale University in 1930, and an MA from the University of Chicago in 1931. During this period, he published his first scientific paper, in physics and co-authored with Irving Langmuir. He attended the University of Göttingen, 1931–1933, studying logic and mathematics under Paul Bernays, Emmy Noether and Hermann Weyl. Göttingen's Mathematisches Institut awarded him the Ph.D. in 1934.
From 1934 through 1938, Mac Lane held short term appointments at Harvard University, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago. He then held a tenure track appointment at Harvard, 1938–1947, before spending the rest of his career at the University of Chicago. In 1944 and 1945, he also directed Columbia University's Applied Mathematics Group, which was involved in the war effort as a contractor for the Applied Mathematics Panel.
Mac Lane served as vice president of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and as president of the American Mathematical Society. While presiding over the Mathematical Association of America in the 1950s, he initiated its activities aimed at improving the teaching of modern mathematics. He was a member of the National Science Board, 1974–1980, advising the American government. In 1976, he led a delegation of mathematicians to China to study the conditions affecting mathematics there. Mac Lane was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1949, and received the National Medal of Science in 1989.
Read more about this topic: Saunders Mac Lane
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)