Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 30, 2005|Volume 34, Number 5

Serge Lang

In Memoriam: Serge Lang

Mathematician and defender of academic standards

Serge Lang, professor emeritus of mathematics and a vigorous advocate for high standards and integrity in science, died suddenly on Sept. 12 in Berkeley, California. He was 78.

He was renowned for his work in algebra and for writing a variety of mathematics textbooks, including the influential "Algebra." His textbooks have a pure mathematics orientation and are hailed for the originality of their problems.

Lang was born in Paris, where he lived and was educated until the 10th grade, when he came to the United States with his family. He completed high school in California, then entered Caltech, where in 1946 he was awarded a B.S. degree in physics. After a year and a half in the U.S. Army, he went to Princeton University, spent a year in the philosophy department, and then switched to mathematics, receiving a Ph.D. in 1951 under the mentoring of Emil Artin.

He taught at Princeton and was a visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton 1951-1953. He was an instructor at the University of Chicago 1953-1955, a professor at Columbia University 1955-1970, and a Fulbright Scholar in Paris in 1958. He came to Yale in 1972 as a tenured professor of mathematics.

Professor Gregg Zuckerman, one of Lang's Yale colleagues, said, "I met Serge and took his course when he visited Princeton in 1970. He was known as an inspiring teacher of mathematics at all levels and his contributions to class field theory, algebraic geometry, and the theory of infinite dimensional manifolds gave him worldwide recognition."

Lang received the Dylan Hixon '88 Prize for Teaching in the Sciences in 2004, and a former student endowed a fund in his honor.

In addition to his university teaching, he gave numerous public lectures and made guest appearances in schools in the United States and abroad. He published several books based on transcripts of these performances that included audience participation.

Lang published numerous research articles. He also produced widely used texts and monographs on a broad range of topics. Several of his monographs are the only treatment of their subjects in book form.

He received the Cole Prize from the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 1959, the Prix Carrière in France in 1967, the Humboldt Award for research and teaching in 1984, and the Steele Prize for Math Exposition from the AMS in 1999. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1985.

Although his principal field was mathematics, his other interests ranged from music to political, social and academic activism. A lifelong concern was the financing of universities and the accompanying threat to intellectual freedom from political and bureaucratic interference. In the 1960s, he was applauded for spearheading a defense of academic research practices against intrusive government regulation.

Lang was particularly concerned with maintaining standards in the academic world, especially the sciences, as they pertained to scientific periodicals, the press at large and the scientific establishment. He spoke out about these issues in a broad spectrum of fields, wherever he perceived a need for thorough documentation and wide distribution of information. As Lang said of his work, he "put scholarship in the service of action to stop the nonsense."

An announcement of a memorial service at Yale to be held this fall will be posted on the Department of Mathematics website, www.math.yale.edu.

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