We’re saddened to note the passing of two giants of twentieth-century algebra, Goro Azumaya and Gerhard Hochschild.
Azumaya, who introduced the idea of an Azumaya algebra and was a professor emeritus at Indiana University, died July 8 at the age of 90. He received his PhD in 1949 from Nagoya University under the direction of Shokichi Iyanaga.
Hochschild, who introduced Hochschild cohomology, died July 8 at the age of 95. He received his PhD in 1941 from Princeton University under the direction of Claude Chevalley. Among the institutions where he worked are the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent most of his career and from where he retired. In 1979 Hochschild was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The next year he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for “his significant work in homological algebra and its applications.”
On a lighter note, did you catch the theorem on an animated TV show last month? (Thanks to Ian Aberbach for this.)