Michael P. Drazin

Isaac Drazin married Leah Wexler, and had three sons, of whom Michael was the eldest, and Philip Drazin, also a mathematician, was the youngest, the middle son being David; and died 1 January 1993.

Drazin gave his name to a type of generalized inverse in ring theory and semigroup theory he introduced in 1958, now known as the Drazin inverse. It was later extended to contexts in operator theory.

In the academic year 1957–8 Drazin was Visiting Lecturer at Northwestern University. In 1958 he began a period at RIAS Inc. (the Research Institute for Advanced Studies) in Baltimore as senior scientist, after which he took a position as associate professor at Purdue University in 1962.

Drazin was a student at the University of Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1950 and M.A. in 1953. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1953 for a dissertation Contributions to Abstract Algebra written with advisers Robert Rankin and David Rees. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1952 to 1956, during that period emigrating to the United States.

Michael Peter Drazin (born 1929) is an American mathematician of British background, working in noncommutative algebra.

Michael Drazin was born in London on 5 June 1929. His younger brother Philip was educated as a boarder at St Christopher School, Letchworth during World War II. The self-published memoirs of Roger Atkinson, a school friend of Michael (Mike), indicate that Michael attended King Alfred School, London, located in Hampstead, retaining contacts at the school when it was evacuated in wartime to Royston, Hertfordshire; Atkinson was a boarder at St Christopher School, Letchworth from September 1942. In 1946 Atkinson and Drazin visited Paris together.

The Drazins (Дразин) were a Russian Jewish family who moved to the United Kingdom in the years before World War I. Isaac Drazin founded in 1927 a well-known electrical goods shop in Heath Street, Hampstead, which existed for over 50 years. He retired in 1982, at age 83.