Roland Percival Sprague (11 July 1894 to 1 August 1967) was a German mathematician, known for the Sprague-Grundy theorem and for being the first mathematician to find a perfect squared square. His grandfathers were the mathematicians Thomas Bond Sprague and Hermann Amandus Schwarz, and he was also a great-grandson of the mathematician Ernst Eduard Kummer. After his Abitur in 1912 at the Bismarck-Gymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf he studied in Berlin and Gottingen from 1912 to 1919, interrupted by military service from 1915 to 1918, and in 1921 passed the state test for teaching mathematics, chemistry and physics. He worked as a secondary school teacher in Berlin from 1922. He is known for his contributions to recreational mathematics, especially the Sprague-Grundy function and its application to combinatorial games, which he and Patrick Michael Grundy discovered independently in 1935 and 1939 respectively.
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In 1921 in Berlin he passed the state test for teaching in mathematics, chemistry, and physics.
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The Sprague-Grundy theorem and its proof encapsulate the main results of a theory discovered independently by R. P. Sprague (1936) and P. M. Grundy (1939).
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