Walter Feit

Walter Feit (26 October 1930 to 29 July 2004) was an Austrian-born American mathematician who worked in finite group theory and representation theory. Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, he escaped to England in 1939 on the Kindertransport and moved to the United States in 1946, where he studied at the University of Chicago. He completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan in 1955 and later became a professor at Cornell University and, in 1964, at Yale University. His most famous result is his proof, joint with John G. Thompson, of the Feit-Thompson theorem that all finite groups of odd order are solvable. He wrote almost a hundred other papers, mostly on finite group theory, character theory and modular representation theory.