Emil Artin was an Austro-German mathematician born on March 3, 1898, in Vienna, Austria. He grew up in what is recently known as Czechoslovakia. When Emil was educated there it was a mainly German speaking city. .

             He did not find himself attracted to mathematics at a very young age, which is very odd since most mathematicians are. He did not show any interest to this subject until about the age of sixteen. He claims that "He didn"t have any particular talent for the subject." The school subject that he did show talent for was chemistry. .

             Artin began his university career at the University of Vienna. After one semester, he was drafted into the Austrian army and he served with this army until the end of the World War I. Then, in January 1919, he entered the University of Leipzig where he continued his mathematics studies. In 1921 he was awarded his doctorate. "His thesis concerned applying the methods of the theory of quadratic number field to quadratic extensions of a field of rational functions of one variable taken over a finite prime field of constants." (www-history.mcs.st-andrew.ac.uk/history/mathematicians/artin.html).

             After receiving his doctorate he attended the University of Göttingen for one year. He then went to the University of Hamburg as a professor. He lectured on different topics such as mathematics, mechanics and relativity. He traveled to the United States in 1937 and became a professor at Notre Dame University (1937-38), Indiana University, Bloomington (1938-46), and Princeton University (1946-58). In 1958 he returned to the University of Hamburg.

             Artin's early work centered on the analytical and arithmetic theory of quadratic number fields. He made major advances in abstract algebra in 1926. In 1927, Artin proved the general law of reciprocity, which included all the previous known laws of reciprocity until the time of Gauss. It has become the main theorem of class field theory.