Max-Albert Knus


Max-Albert Knus is a Swiss mathematician specializing in algebra.
He was born April 14, 1942, in Peseux, Neuchatel. He studied mathematics at ETH Zurich with Beno Eckmann and K. Chandrasekharan, graduating in 1967 with a PhD thesis titled On a class of filtered algebras.
He was a Batelle-fellow at ETH and Brandeis University. He was director of research at University of Geneva. In 1969 he returned to ETH as a professor and became emeritus in 2007.
Knus expanded algebraic number theory to include a wider variety of structures. The classical study considers algebras over a field, whereas Knus considers algebras over a ring as in his monograph Quadratic and Hermitian Forms over Rings. In the preface he acknowledges colleagues that contributed to the science: "Many results in this book were developed by Raman Parimala, Ramaiyengar Sridharan and Manuel Orjanguran. I am deeply grateful to them for doing mathematics in Bombay, Lausanne or Zurich."
Then in 1998 Knus joined Alexander Merkurjev, Markus Rost, and Jean-Pierre Tignol to write The Book of Involutions published by the American Mathematical Society. This book is about "central simple algebras with involution, in relation to linear algebraic groups."
His research interests include Galois cohomology.
Since 1997 he has been a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Selected works