Ames Bliss, and logic with Mortimer J. Adler. In 1931, having earned his master's degree and feeling restless at Chicago, he earned a fellowship from the Institute of International Education and became one of the last Americans to study at the University of Göttingen prior to its decline under the Nazis. His greatest influences there were Paul Bernays and Hermann Weyl. By the time he finished his doctorate in 1934, Bernays had been forced to leave because he was Jewish, and Weyl became his main examiner. At Göttingen, Mac Lane also studied with Gustav Herglotz and Emmy Noether. Within days of finishing his degree, he married Dorothy Jones, from Chicago, and soon returned to the U.S. Career From 1934 through 1938, Mac Lane held short-term appointments at Yale University, Harvard University, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago. He then held a tenure track appointment at Harvard from 1938 to 1947. In 1941, while giving a series of visiting lectures at the University of Michigan, he met Samuel Eilenberg and began what would become a fruitful collaboration on the interplay between algebra and topology. In 1944 and 1945, he also directed Columbia University's Applied Mathematics Group, which was involved in the war effort as a contractor for the Applied Mathematics Panel; the mathematics he worked on in this group concerned differential equations for fire-control systems. In 1947, he accepted an offer to return to Chicago, where (in part because of the university's involvement in the Manhattan Project, and in part because of the administrative efforts of Marshall Stone) many other famous mathematicians and physicists had also recently moved. He traveled as a Guggenheim Fellow to ETH Zurich for the 1947–1948 term, where he worked with Heinz Hopf. Mac Lane succeeded Stone as department chair in 1952, and served for six years. Mac Lane was vice president of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and president of the American Mathematical Society. While presiding over the Mathematical Association of America in the 1950s, he initiated its activities aimed at improving the teaching of modern mathematics. He was a member of the National Science Board, 1974–1980, advising the American government. In 1976, he led a delegation of mathematicians to China to study the conditions affecting mathematics there. Mac Lane was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1949, and received the National Medal of Science in 1989. Contributions