Bernd Fischer (mathematician)

Bernd Fischer (1936 to 2020) was a German mathematician who worked in group theory and is remembered above all for his part in the classification of finite simple groups. In 1970 he classified the almost simple groups generated by 3-transpositions, and in doing so discovered three new sporadic groups that now bear his name as the Fischer groups. By loosening the conditions of that classification he predicted in 1973 the existence of two much larger sporadic groups, the baby monster and the monster, which turned out to be the two largest sporadic groups that could exist. He later computed the character table of the baby monster together with Donald Livingstone and Michael Thorne. He took his doctorate in 1963 at Goethe University in Frankfurt under Reinhold Baer and afterwards held a post at Bielefeld University, where he became head of mathematical sciences.