Although mental illness cut his career somewhat short, Joseph Henry Maclagen Wedderburn made important contributions to algebra and wrote extensively on matrices. He taught at Princeton University for many years.

The son of a physician, Wedderburn was born the tenth of 14 children on February 26, 1882 in Forfar, Angus, Scotland. He began his academic career at the University of Edinburgh in 1898, earning a master's degree in mathematics from the school in 1903. During the 1903-1904 academic year, Wedderburn did postgraduate work at the University of Leipzig and the University of Berlin.

Making his first trip to the United States in 1904, Wedderburn used a Carnegie scholarship to study for a year at the University of Chicago. There he met and worked with Oswald Veblen for a short time before returning to Scotland and the University of Edinburgh. Wedderburn worked at the school until 1909, also serving as editor of the Proceedings of the...