Maxwell Rosenlicht (1924–1999)

Maxwell Rosenlicht was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended Erasmus High School. He earned his B.A. at Columbia University in 1947, and then went to Harvard University for his Ph.D. in mathematics, which he earned in 1950. There he studied with the eminent algebraic geometer Oscar Zariski. Rosenlicht was named a Putnam Fellow twice, in 1946 and 1947. In 1952, he joined the mathematics faculty at Northwestern University. From 1958 until his retirement in 1991, he was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He also served as a visiting professor at the University of Rome, the University of Leiden, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France, the University of Catalunya, the National University of Mexico, and Harvard. Rosenlicht was a Fulbright Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1954. That same year, he married Carla Zingarelli, with whom he had four children. In 1960, he shared the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra from the American Mathematical Society with Serge Lang.