Leonard Eugene Dickson

Leonard Eugene Dickson was an American mathematician who grew up in Cleburne, Texas, and considered himself a Texan. He studied at the University of Texas at Austin, where George Bruce Halsted encouraged his mathematics and supervised his master's degree in 1894. In 1896, aged 22, he received the first doctorate in mathematics awarded by the University of Chicago, supervised by E. H. Moore, and then studied in Leipzig and Paris under Sophus Lie and Camille Jordan. He was one of the first American researchers in abstract algebra, especially finite fields and classical groups, wrote a three-volume history of number theory, and supervised 53 doctoral students at Chicago.