Sheldon Axler is Dean of the College of Science & Engineering at San Francisco State University. He received his AB degree with highest honors in mathematics from Princeton University in 1971 and his PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1975. After being a Moore Instructor at MIT, he was an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and then Professor at Michigan State University, where he received the Distinguished Faculty Award in 1991. In 1997 Sheldon became Chair of the Mathematics Department at San Francisco State University; he became a Dean at that university in 2002. Sheldon has been a Research Professor at MSRI and has had a visiting position at Indiana University.

In 1996 Sheldon received the Lester Ford Award for expository writing from the Mathematical Association of America. His book Linear Algebra Done Right has been adopted as a textbook by over 175 universities and colleges. Sheldon is also the co-author of the graduate textbook Harmonic Function Theory as well as numerous papers in his research areas of functional analysis and complex analysis.

Sheldon has served as Associate Editor of the American Mathematical Monthly and as Editor-in-Chief of the Mathematical Intelligencer. He has been a member of the Council of the American Mathematical Society and the Nominating Committee of the American Mathematical Society. Currently Sheldon is on the Editorial Board for three book series published by Springer: Graduate Texts in Mathematics, Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics, and Universitext. He was appointed a CCST Fellow in 2008.