Anton Kazimirovich Suschkewitsch was a Russian mathematician who spent most of his working life at Kharkov State University in the Ukraine. In the 1920s, he embarked upon the first systematic study of semigroups, placing him at the very beginning of algebraic semigroup theory and, arguably, earning him the title of the world's first semigroup theorist. Owing to the political circumstances under which he lived, however, his work failed to find a wide audience during his lifetime. We give a brief account of his life and his researches into semigroup theory. © 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
