Dudley E. Littlewood

Dudley Ernest Littlewood (1903 to 1979) was a British mathematician known for his work in group representation theory. Born in London, he read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating in 1925, then taught at University College Swansea from 1928 until 1947, with a short spell in Dundee. At Swansea the algebraist Archibald Read Richardson introduced him to research, and in 1934 the two published a paper on group characters and algebras in which they introduced the immanant of a matrix and the S-functions now called Schur functions, and stated the rule for multiplying them that is called the Littlewood-Richardson rule. He went on to study the characters of the symmetric group and applied S-functions to invariant theory and quantum mechanics, and his 1940 book on group characters and matrix representations of groups was the best known of his three books. He held the chair of mathematics at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, from 1948 until he retired in 1970, and died at Llandudno.