Background
Rosenberg, Alex was born on December 5, 1926 in Berlin, Germany. Son of Theodore and Rela (Banet) Rosenberg. came to the United States, 1949, naturalized, 1959.
Rosenberg, Alex was born on December 5, 1926 in Berlin, Germany. Son of Theodore and Rela (Banet) Rosenberg. came to the United States, 1949, naturalized, 1959.
Rosenberg was born on December 5, 1926 in Berlin. His family escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, moving to Switzerland, to England, and then to Ontario, Canada. Rosenberg graduated in 1948 from the University of Toronto, with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics, and earned a master"s degree there the following year.
He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in 1951 at the University of Chicago, with a doctoral thesis on ring theory supervised by Irving Kaplansky.
Although some sources confuse the two, he should be distinguished from Alexander L. (Sasha) Rosenberg, a mathematician at Kansas State University. After postdoctoral studies at the University of Michigan, Rosenberg taught at Northwestern University from 1952 to 1961, becoming a United States citizen in 1959. His students at Northwestern included Vera Pless, later to be known for her work in combinatorics and coding theory.
He moved to Cornell University in 1961, and served as department chair there from 1966 to 1969.
In 1986 he moved again, to become chair of the mathematics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was named emeritus at Cornell in 1988, and retired from UCSB in 1994.
Rosenberg"s research was in the area of abstract algebra, including the application of homology to Galois theory and to the theory of quadratic forms. With Gerhard Hochschild and Bertram Kostant, he is one of the namesakes of the Hochschild–Kostant–Rosenberg theorem, which they published in 1962 and which describes the Hochschild homology of some algebras.
Married Beatrice Gershenson, August 24, 1952 (divorced April 1985). Children: Theodore Joseph, David Michael (deceased), Daniel Alex. Married Brunhilde Angun, June 14, 1985.