Max-Albert Knus

Max-Albert Knus is a Swiss mathematician specializing in algebra.

He was born April 14, 1942, in Peseux, Neuchatel.^[1][2] 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.^[3]

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.^[2][4]

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 (1991).^[5] In the preface he acknowledges colleagues that contributed to the science: "Many results in this book were developed by (or in collaboration with) Raman Parimala, Ramaiyengar Sridharan and Manuel Orjanguran.^[6] 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^[7] published by the American Mathematical Society.^[8] 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.^[9]