Richard Brauer

Richard Dagobert Brauer ( born February 10, 1901 in Charlottenburg, † April 17, 1977 in Belmont, Massachusetts ) was a German - American mathematician.

Childhood and youth

Brewer was the son of leather goods dealer Max Brauer and his wife Lilly Caroline. He was the youngest of three children, his seven- year older brother Alfred was also a mathematician.

Richard Brauer attended from 1907 to 1918, the Kaiser Friedrich School in Charlottenburg, then a separate village just outside Berlin, and during that time developed a passion for math problems, but more the influence of his brother was crucial as the quality of the educators. Only one of the teachers who did his doctorate under Frobenius was able to convince him.

The last four years of his schooling took place during the First World War, but was too young brewer to be recovered. After graduating in September 1918, he was only used to do community service in Berlin and in November - after the war - he was able to continue his education.

Study

His childhood dream was to become an inventor was, and so he began in February 1919, despite his devotion to mathematics, first studying at the Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg, which later became the Technical University of Berlin. But he noticed after only one semester, that the theoretical direction more than it promised practical. He therefore went to the Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm University.

At the University of Berlin at that time taught some of the greatest mathematicians and scientists: Ludwig Bieberbach, Constantin Carathéodory, Albert Einstein, Konrad Knopp, Richard von Mises, Max Planck, Erhard Schmidt, Isay Schur and Gábor Szegő. Brauer describes the lectures at Schmidt follows:

According to the tradition of German students to change their place of study, even brewers of Berlin went away. He studied at the University of Freiburg, but he returned after only one semester back to Berlin. Here he attended seminars by Bieberbach, Schmidt and Schur. It pulled him now more and more to algebra, as introduced Schur in his seminars:

In fact, it was one of these open problems that Richard could work together to solve with his brother in 1921 and led to a first publication. Schur it was who suggested the topic for dissertation brewer. Richard Brauer graduated with this work 1926. Including interactions with an algebraic approach for the characterization of irreducible representations of the real orthogonal group.

Prior to his promotion Brauer had received a position as assistant to Konrad Knopp in Königsberg and married his fellow student Ilse Karger. In the fall of 1925, he took his place in East Prussia. However, shortly after his arrival Knopp went to the University of Tübingen and because the Department of Mathematics at Königsberg was not very big, Brauer had a lot of responsibilities and freedoms. There were two professors, Gabor Szego and Kurt Reidemeister, and beside Brauer two assistants. Brauer taught at Königsberg until the spring of 1933, when he to the National Socialists lost his position after the transfer of power and had to go abroad, where they received him gratefully.

Emigration to the USA

Brauer was initially for one year to Lexington (Kentucky). After this engagement, he was an assistant to Hermann Weyl, corresponding to a long -cherished wish brewer. 1935 both issued a joint work on Spinore in the American Journal of Mathematics. This paper formed the basis for Dirac's concept of electron spin in quantum mechanics.

In the fall of 1935, Brewer was appointed to a permanent position as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, this was done on the recommendation of Emmy Noether. Here Brauer developed some of his most impressive theories by bringing the work of Frobenius in a new direction. Together with C. Nesbitt, he developed the theory of blocks, with whose help he received results for finite groups, in particular the finite simple groups.

After a year at the University of Wisconsin (1941 ) 1948 final, he went back to the U.S., at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 1949 he received the coveted Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society for his work On Artin 's L-series with general group characters, which he had published in 1947 in the American Journal of Mathematics. In 1954 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam ( On the structure of groups of finite order).

In 1951 he was offered a professorship at Harvard University, which he accepted in 1952. Here he remained until his retirement in 1971. At Harvard, he began with the classification of all finite simple groups. The first step was a group-theoretic characterization of PSL (2, q). The rest of his creative life devoted brewers now the classification work. However, he died a few years before this project had culminated provisionally.

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice ( blocks of characters ) and 1962 in Stockholm (On finite groups of even order).

Publishing activities

Despite his scientific work, he found time to act as editor of several journals:

• Transactions of the Canadian Mathematical Congress (1943-1949)
• American Journal of Mathematics (1944-1950)
• Canadian Journal of Mathematics (1949-1959)
• Duke Mathematical Journal (1951-1956, 1963-1969)
• Annals of Mathematics (1953-1960)
• Proceedings of the Canadian Mathematical Congress (1954-1957)
• Journal of Algebra (1964-1970)

Works

• On the modular representations of groups of finite order, University of Toronto Press 1937
• Paul Fong, Warren J. Wong ( Editor): Richard Brauer - Collected Papers, MIT Press 1980