R. H. Bruck

Richard Hubert Bruck (* December 26, 1914, † 1991) was an American mathematician who worked on combinatorics.

Bruck studied in Toronto, where he received his doctorate in 1940. After that, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

In 1949 he proved with Herbert Ryser ("The non existence of finite projective planes Certain, Canadian Journal of Mathematics vol.1, 1949, p.88 -92) the set of Bruck- Ryser- Chowla about possible orders n of finite projective planes (from Ryser and Chowla 1950 Sarvadaman extended to other symmetric block diagrams). He has so far been the only general result which restricts the possible finite projective planes: let n = 1 or 2 mod 4, then there is no such level if not for all k, m.

In 1951, he led a finite networks.

1946/7 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and 1963 Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Canberra. In 1956 he received the Chauvenet Prize for " Recent Advances in the foundations of Euclidean Plane Geometry " (American Mathematical Monthly 1955). In 1962 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( On the completion of finite partial plan ).