Covering a period up to 1971, this selection of Saunders Mac Lane’s most distinguished papers takes the reader on a journey through the most important milestones of the mathematical world in the twentieth century. Mac Lane was an extraordinary mathematician and a dedicated teacher who cared earnestly about the values of science and education. His life spanned nearly a century of mathematical progress. In his earlier years, he participated in the exciting developments in Göttingen. He studied under David Hilbert, Hermann Weyl, and Paul Bernays. Later, he contributed to the more abstract and general mathematical viewpoints which emerged in the twentieth century. Perhaps the most outstanding accomplishment during his long and extraordinary career was the development of the concept and theory of categories, together with Samuel Eilenberg, which has broad applications in different areas, in particular in topology and the foundations of mathematics.
A Biographical Note.- [ 2]* Abgekürzte Beweise im Logikkalkul.- A Late
Return to a Thesis in Logic.- [ 10] A construction for absolute values in
polynomial rings.- [ 11] A combinatorial condition for planar graphs.- [ 13]
Planar graphs whose homeomorphisms can all be extended for any mapping on the
sphere.- [ 14] A lattice formulation for transcendence degrees and p-bases.-
[ 21] Modular fields, I. Separating transcendence bases.- [ 22] Subfields and
automorphism groups of p-adic fields.- [ 28] Note on the relative structure of
p-adic fields.- [ 41] Group extensions and homology.- [ 44] Groups of algebras
over an algebraic number field.- [ 45] Relations between homology and homotopy
groups.- [ 48] General theory of natural equivalences.- [ 55] Groups,
categories and duality.- [ 58] Cohomology theory in abstract groups, III.
Operator homomorphisms of kernels.- [ 63] On the 3-type of a complex.- [ 69]
Acyclic models.- [ 78] Homologie des anneaux et des modules.- [ 90] Natural
associativity and commutativity.- [ 105] The Milgram bar construction as a
tensor product of functors.- [ 107] Hamiltonian mechanics and geometry.- [ 109]
Coherence in closed categories.- Saunders Mac Lane as a Shaper of Mathematics
and Mathematicians.- The Early Work of Saunders Mac Lane on Valuations and
Fields.- Some Remarks on the Interface of Algebra and Geometry.- Saunders Mac
Lane and Category Theory.- Bibliography of the Publications of Saunders Mac
Lane.- List of Ph.D. Theses written under the Supervision of Saunders Mac
Lane.
