Joseph Henry Maclagen Wedderburn | Biography

Although mental illness cut his career somewhat short, Joseph Henry Maclagen Wedderburn made important contributions to algebra and wrote extensively on matrices. He taught at Princeton University for many years.

The son of a physician, Wedderburn was born the tenth of 14 children on February 26, 1882 in Forfar, Angus, Scotland. He began his academic career at the University of Edinburgh in 1898, earning a master's degree in mathematics from the school in 1903. During the 1903-1904 academic year, Wedderburn did postgraduate work at the University of Leipzig and the University of Berlin.

Making his first trip to the United States in 1904, Wedderburn used a Carnegie scholarship to study for a year at the University of Chicago. There he met and worked with Oswald Veblen for a short time before returning to Scotland and the University of Edinburgh. Wedderburn worked at the school until 1909, also serving as editor of the Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society from 1906 to 1908.

Meanwhile, Wedderburn was doing his best work in mathematics. In 1905, he proved that a noncommutative finite field could not exist--a revelation that had important implications for projective geometry and number theory--and in 1907 he published his best-known paper on the classification of semisimple algebras. In this paper ("On Hypercomplex Numbers"), Wedderburn showed 1) that a semisimple algebra is a matrix algebra over a division ring and 2) that every semisimple algebra is a direct sum of simple algebras. These two theorems, which still bear his name, signaled the beginning of a new era in this field of research.

Wedderburn returned to the United States in 1909 to work as a preceptor in mathematics at Princeton University (New Jersey) and took on the additional role of editor of the Annals of Mathematics in 1912. He remained at Princeton until World War I began in 1914, when he volunteered for the British Army. He served in Britain and France until the war ended in 1918.

Returning to Princeton, Wedderburn obtained permanent tenure in 1921 and continued working as editor of the Annals until 1928. At about this point, however, Wedderburn apparently began suffering from emotional disturbances that gradually caused him to withdraw from life. Yet despite these problems, he managed to produce his most famous work, a textbook entitled Lectures on Matrices, in 1934.

Wedderburn continued to teach and do research at Princeton until 1945, when the school granted him early retirement due to his illness. He died there on October 9, 1948.