Max-Albert Knus

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Max-Albert Knus is a Swiss mathematician who works in algebra. He was born on April 14, 1942, in Peseux, near Neuchâtel. He studied at ETH Zurich with Beno Eckmann and K. Chandrasekharan and earned his PhD in 1967 with a thesis on a class of filtered algebras. He was a Batelle fellow at ETH and Brandeis University, and later served as director of research at the University of Geneva. In 1969 he returned to ETH as a professor and became emeritus in 2007. Knus broadened algebraic number theory to include more general structures: while most work studies algebras over a field, he studied algebras over rings, as shown in Quadratic and Hermitian Forms over Rings (1991). In the preface he thanks colleagues who helped, Raman Parimala, Ramaiyengar Sridharan, and Manuel Orjanguran, for doing mathematics in Bombay, Lausanne or Zurich. In 1998 he coauthored The Book of Involutions with Alexander Merkurjev, Markus Rost and Jean-Pierre Tignol, about central simple algebras with involution and their relation to linear algebraic groups. His research also includes Galois cohomology. Since 1997 he has been a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation.