Alfred William Goldie (10 December 1920, Coseley,

Staffordshire Staffordshire (; postal abbreviation Staffs.) is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. It borders Cheshire to the northwest, Derbyshire and Leicestershire to the east, Warwickshire to the southeast, the West Midlands Cou ...

– 8 October 2005,

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Cumbria Cumbria ( ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in North West England, bordering Scotland. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local government, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumb ...

) was an

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

Biography

Goldie was educated at

Wolverhampton Grammar School Wolverhampton Grammar School is a co-educational independent school in Wolverhampton, England. History Initially a grammar school for boys, WGS was founded in 1512 by Sir Stephen Jenyns, a master of the ancient guild of Merchant Taylors, who ...

and then read

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

at St John's College,

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

. His studies were interrupted by war work on

ballistics Ballistics is the field of mechanics concerned with the launching, flight behaviour and impact effects of projectiles, especially ranged weapon munitions such as bullets, unguided bombs, rockets or the like; the science or art of designing and a ...

with the Armament Research Department of the

Ministry of Supply The Ministry of Supply (MoS) was a department of the UK government formed in 1939 to co-ordinate the supply of equipment to all three British armed forces, headed by the Minister of Supply. A separate ministry, however, was responsible for aircr ...

, eventually taking his BA in 1942 and MA in 1946.

Academic career

Goldie became an assistant

lecturer Lecturer is an List of academic ranks, academic rank within many universities, though the meaning of the term varies somewhat from country to country. It generally denotes an academic expert who is hired to teach on a full- or part-time basis. T ...

at the

University of Nottingham The University of Nottingham is a public university, public research university in Nottingham, United Kingdom. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. The University of Nottingham belongs t ...

in 1946. In 1948 he was appointed lecturer in

Pure Mathematics Pure mathematics is the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside mathematics. These concepts may originate in real-world concerns, and the results obtained may later turn out to be useful for practical applications, ...

at what was then King's College, Durham (and has been the

University of Newcastle upon Tyne Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is a red brick univer ...

since 1963) where he was promoted to

senior lecturer Senior lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and Israel senior lecturer is a faculty position at a university or similar institution. The position is tenured (in systems with this concep ...

in 1958 and

reader A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to: Computing and technology * Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader * Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application * A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...

algebra Algebra () is one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics. Elementary a ...

in 1960. In 1963 Goldie was appointed

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

at the

University of Leeds , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...

. He retired from his chair in 1986 with the title

emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

. Goldie won the 1970

Senior Berwick Prize The Berwick Prize and Senior Berwick Prize are two prizes of the London Mathematical Society awarded in alternating years in memory of William Edward Hodgson Berwick, a previous Vice-President of the LMS. Berwick left some money to be given to the s ...

from the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical S ...

, where he also served as vice-president from 1978 to 1980. Goldie worked in

ring theory In algebra, ring theory is the study of rings— algebraic structures in which addition and multiplication are defined and have similar properties to those operations defined for the integers. Ring theory studies the structure of rings, their re ...

, where he introduced the notion of the

uniform dimension In abstract algebra, a module is called a uniform module if the intersection of any two nonzero submodules is nonzero. This is equivalent to saying that every nonzero submodule of ''M'' is an essential submodule. A ring may be called a right (left ...

of a module, and the reduced rank of a module. He is well known for

Goldie's theorem In mathematics, Goldie's theorem is a basic structural result in ring theory, proved by Alfred Goldie during the 1950s. What is now termed a right Goldie ring is a ring ''R'' that has finite uniform dimension (="finite rank") as a right module over ...

, which characterizes right Goldie rings. Indeed, his ''

Independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s * Independ ...

'' obituary described him as the "Lord of the Rings".

Personal life

Goldie married Mary Kenyon in 1944. They had three children (from eldest to youngest): Isobel (Carlyle), Helen, and John. Both Isobel and Helen completed PhDs in Geography, while John completed a degree in Music. Mary died in 1995 and in 2002 he married Margaret Turner, who survived him.

References

Mathematics People, Notices AMS
*S C Coutinho and J C McConnell
The Quest for Quotient Rings (Of Noncommutative Noetherian Rings)
Amer. Math. Monthly 110 (4) (2003), 298-313. *J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

*Mathematics Genealogy Project
doctoral students of Alfred Goldie
{{DEFAULTSORT:Goldie, Alfred 1920 births 2005 deaths 20th-century English mathematicians Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Academics of the University of Nottingham Academics of the University of Leeds