Alfred Brauer

Alfred Theodor Brauer (1894 to 1985) was a German-American mathematician who worked in number theory. Born in Berlin into a Jewish family, the oldest of three children and the elder brother of Richard Brauer, he served four years in the German army in the First World War and was seriously wounded, which cost him years at the start of his studies. He studied at the University of Berlin, attended Issai Schur's seminar in 1920 and with his brother solved one of Schur's open problems in 1921. His dissertation, written under Schur, was published in 1928, and he went on to publish a long series of papers in number theory while helping to build the library of the mathematical institute in Berlin. Dismissed from his post in 1935 under the Nazi civil service laws, he was able to leave Germany only in 1939, and from 1942 he taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he spent the rest of his career and died at the age of 91.