Alfred Foster (mathematician), Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetAlfred Foster (mathematician)
American mathematician
Date of Birth: 13-Jul-1904
Place of Birth: New York City, New York, United States
Date of Death: 24-Dec-1994
Profession: mathematician
Zodiac Sign: Cancer 
About Alfred Foster (mathematician)
- Alfred Leon Foster (known as Alfred Foster) was an American mathematician.
- He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley from 1934 until 1971.
- In 1932 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Zürich. In 1934 he accepted a regular position at Berkeley.
- At that time Griffith Evans was Head of the Mathematics Department and was charged by President Sproul with building a first-class mathematics center, which he did.
- Alfred Foster and Charles Morrey (who became the first department chairman after Evans' retirement) were Evans' first two appointments.
- Except for subsequent sabbatical leaves, spent most notably in Freiburg and Tübingen, Foster served continuously at Berkeley until his retirement at the then-mandatory age of 67 in 1971. Foster's Ph.D.
- dissertation and his first few papers were in the area of mathematical logic.
- Starting from this point, he soon focused his interest on the related theory of Boolean algebras and Boolean rings, and was thus led from logic to algebra.
- He extensively studied the role of duality in Boolean theory and subsequently developed a theory of n-ality for certain rings which played for n-valued logics the role of Boolean rings vis-a-vis Boolean algebras.
- The late Benjamin Bernstein of the Berkeley mathematics faculty was his collaborator in some of this research.
- This work culminated in his seminal paper “The theory of Boolean-like rings” appearing in 1946.Foster was married to Else Wagner; their marriage produced four children and eight grandchildren.
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