In memoriam: Earl Jay Taft (1931–2021)

Communications in Algebra mourns the loss of our founding editor, Earl J. Taft. Professor Taft died on August 9, 2021 in San Francisco, California, a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday. He had relocated 18 months earlier to California with his wife Hessy. He was a devoted husband, a caring and proud father, a loving grandfather, and a great friend to so many. He lived a full and rich life, made friends around the globe, and enjoyed his profession immensely.

Earl completed his undergraduate degree Phi Beta Kappa at Amherst College in 1952. He received his Ph.D. degree from Yale in 1956 completing a dissertation titled Invariant Wedderburn Factors under Nathan Jacobson. After a three year stint at Columbia University as the Ritt Instructor of Mathematics, he joined the faculty at Rutgers University, where he spent the next 58 years. He retired from Rutgers as a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics. His years at Rutgers included numerous visits to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Professor Taft made numerous contributions in the area of Wedderburn-Malcev decompositions, and, notably, in the study of Hopf Algebras. Indeed, there is an important class of Hopf algebras called “Taft Algebras” which he introduced in 1971¹.

In 1974, Earl was the founding Editor-in-Chief for Communications in Algebra. Originally published by Marcel Dekker, the founding Editorial Board consisted of 36 Associate Editors and the 1974 volumes consisted of a little over 1,100 pages, all published in camera-ready form produced from the author’s own manuscripts. Professor Taft remained the journal’s Editor-in-Chief through 1999. The journal was subsequently acquired by Taylor and Francis, and today publishes more than 5,000 pages annually with Associate Editors in over 11 different countries. The success and vitality today of Communications in Algebra is directly attributable to the long years of tireless work and dedication of Earl Taft. He will be greatly missed.

Scott Chapman and Lance Small [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1205-6899

Notes

1 Taft, Earl J. (1971), “The order of the antipode of finite-dimensional Hopf algebra,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 68(11): 2631–2633.