Samuel Eilenberg
Samuel Eilenberg (September 30, 1913 – January 30, 1998) was a Polish-American mathematician who co-founded category theory (with Saunders Mac Lane) and homological algebra. Early life and education He was born in Warsaw, Kingdom of Poland to a Jewish family. He spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University. He earned his Ph.D. from University of Warsaw in 1936, with thesis On the Topological Applications of Maps onto a Circle; his thesis advisors were Kazimierz Kuratowski and Karol Borsuk. He died in New York City in January 1998. Career Eilenberg's main body of work was in algebraic topology. He worked on the axiomatic treatment of homology theory with Norman Steenrod (and the Eilenberg–Steenrod axioms are named for the pair), and on homological algebra with Saunders Mac Lane. In the process, Eilenberg and Mac Lane created category theory. Eilenberg was a member of Bourbaki and, with Henri Cartan, wrote the 1956 book Homological Algebra. Later in life he worked mainly in pure category theory, being one of the founders of the field. The Eilenberg swindle (or telescope) is a construction applying the telescoping cancellation idea to projective modules. Eilenberg contributed to automata theory and algebraic automata theory. In