Garrett Birkhoff (January 19, 1911 - November 22, 1996) was an American mathematician who was born in Princeton, New Jersey, USA and died on November 22,1996 in Water Mill , New York, USA.
He is the son of the mathematician George David Birkhoff.
He was homeschooled until he was eight years old. Then he went on to a public grammar school for three years. Then he took off a year of school to play sports and mature before high school since he was only 11.
Birkhoff is most famous for the creation of a new branch of mathematics, universal algebra, with his 1935 paper, On the Structure of Abstract Algebras. He also did extensive work in lattice theory.
In 1941 he and Saunders MacLane published their influential textbook, A Survey of Modern Algebra, the first undergraduate textbook in English for the field of abstract algebra.
External link
