Artin, Emil

Emil Artin, (born March 3, 1898, Vienna, Austria—died Dec. 20, 1962, Hamburg, W.Ger.), Austro-German mathematician who made fundamental contributions to class field theory, notably the general law of reciprocity.

After one year at the University of Göttingen, Artin joined the staff of the University of Hamburg in 1923. He emigrated to the United States in 1937, where he taught at Notre Dame University (1937–38), Indiana University, Bloomington (1938–46), and Princeton University (1946–58). In 1958 he returned to the University of Hamburg.

Artin was an influential algebraist who through his research and his teaching helped spread the abstract viewpoint introduced by Emmy Noether. His early work centred on the analytical and arithmetic theory of quadratic number fields. He made major advances in abstract algebra in 1926 and the following year used the theory of formal-real fields to solve the Hilbert problem of definite functions. In 1927 he also made notable contributions to the theory of algebras, and an important class of rings, now known as Artin rings, were discovered by him in 1944.

His theory of braids, set forth in 1925, was a major contribution to the study of knots in three-dimensional space. Artin’s books include Geometric Algebra (1957) and, with John T. Tate, Class Field Theory (1961). Most of his technical papers are found in The Collected Papers of Emil Artin (1965).