Richard Brauer

Richard Dagobert Brauer (1901 to 1977) was a German and American mathematician who worked mainly in abstract algebra and made important contributions to number theory. He founded modular representation theory. Born on February 10, 1901, he studied in Berlin and was awarded his PhD there on March 16, 1926, with a thesis written under Issai Schur on an algebraic approach to representations of real orthogonal groups. He introduced the Brauer group while working in Konigsberg as Konrad Knopp's assistant. After the Nazi takeover in 1933 he emigrated to the United States, taught at the University of Kentucky, the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Toronto, and later at Michigan and Harvard, retiring in 1971. His brother Alfred Brauer was also a mathematician. He died on April 17, 1977.