Richard Dagobert Brauer

Personal life
Richard Dagobert Brauer (10 February 1901 - 17 April 1977) was born in Germany, but spent his later life in Canada and the United States of America. He had to leave Germany on account of Hitler.

Group theory
Brauer worked mainly on the theory of characters and representations, and applied this work towards the classification of finite simple groups.


 * 1937: Introduced the idea of blocks in joint work with his student Nesbitt
 * 1947: Published a paper On Artin's L-series of generalized group characters in Annals of Mathematics which was to win him the Cole Prize in 1949
 * 1951: As a first step towards the classification of finite simple groups, obtained a group-theoretical characterization of projective special linear groups
 * 1955: Published a paper with his doctoral student, Fowler, titled On groups of even order. This was a major step towards the odd-order theorem of Feit and Thompson. Brauer's paper showed that there are only finitely many finite simple groups containing an involution whose centraliser is a given finite group.