Joseph J. Rotman (May 26, 1934 – October 16, 2016) was a Professor of Mathematics at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

and also a published author of 10 textbooks. Rotman was born in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

, where he received his doctorate in 1959 with a thesis in

abelian group In mathematics, an abelian group, also called a commutative group, is a group in which the result of applying the group operation to two group elements does not depend on the order in which they are written. That is, the group operation is comm ...

s written under the direction of

Irving Kaplansky Irving Kaplansky (March 22, 1917 – June 25, 2006) was a mathematician, college professor, author, and amateur musician.O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Irving Kaplansky", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andr ...

. In 1959 he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he spent the rest of his mathematical career. Rotman retired from UIUC in 2004. His research interests lay in the area of

algebra Algebra () is one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics. Elementary ...

, involving

abelian groups In mathematics, an abelian group, also called a commutative group, is a group in which the result of applying the group operation to two group elements does not depend on the order in which they are written. That is, the group operation is commut ...

modules Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a s ...

, homological algebra, and combinatorics. Rotman was the Managing Editor of the '' Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society'' in 1972–1973.Retirements: Joseph Rotman
, Math Times, Spring 2004, p. 9, Department of Mathematics,

. In 1985 he was the Annual Visiting Lecturer of the

South African Mathematical Society The South African Mathematical Society (SAMS) is a professional mathematical society of South Africa. The Society was established in 1957. The SAMS publishes a research journal ''Quaestiones Mathematicae'', as well the ''Notices of the South Africa ...

.Faculty honors
, Department of Mathematics,

. A partial list of Rotman's publications includes: * ''An Introduction to Homological Algebra'' (1979), Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 85, Academic Press; * ''An Introduction to Algebraic Topology'' (1988), Springer-Verlag; * ''An Introduction to the Theory of Groups'' (1995), Springer-Verlag; * ''A First Course in Abstract Algebra'' (2000), Prentice Hall; * ''Advanced Modern Algebra'' (2002), Prentice Hall; * ''Journey into Mathematics: an introduction to proofs'' (2006),

Dover Publications Dover Publications, also known as Dover Books, is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward and Blanche Cirker. It primarily reissues books that are out of print from their original publishers. These are often, but not always, book ...

;

References

1934 births 2016 deaths 21st-century American mathematicians University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty University of Chicago alumni Algebraists People from Chicago Mathematicians from Illinois 20th-century American mathematicians {{US-mathematician-stub