Richard Dagobert Brauer (February 10, 1901 – April 17, 1977) was a German and American mathematician. He worked mainly in abstract algebra, but made important contributions to number theory. He was the founder of modular representation theory.

Education and career

Alfred Brauer was Richard's brother and seven years older. They were born to a Jewish family. Both were interested in science and mathematics, but Alfred was injured in combat in World War I. As a boy, Richard dreamt of becoming an inventor, and in February 1919 enrolled in Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg. He soon transferred to University of Berlin. Except for the summer of 1920 when he studied at University of Freiburg, he studied in Berlin, being awarded his PhD on 16 March 1926. Issai Schur conducted a seminar and posed a problem in 1921 that Alfred and Richard worked on together, and published a result. The problem also was solved by Heinz Hopf at the same time. Richard wrote his thesis under Schur, providing an algebraic approach to irreducible, continuous, finite-dimensional representations of real orthogonal (rotation) groups.

Ilse Karger also studied mathematics at the University of Berlin; she and Brauer were married 17 September 1925. Their sons George Ulrich (born 1927) and Fred Gunther (born 1932) also became mathematicians. Brauer began his teaching career in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) working as Konrad Knopp’s assistant. Brauer expounded central division algebras over a perfect field while in Königsberg; the isomorphism classes of such algebras form the elements of the Brauer group he introduced.

When the Nazi Party took over in 1933, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars took action to help Brauer and other Jewish scientists. the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1955, and the American Philosophical Society in 1974. The Brauers frequently traveled to see their friends such as Reinhold Baer, Werner Wolfgang Rogosinski, and Carl Ludwig Siegel.

Mathematical work

Several theorems bear his name, including Brauer's induction theorem, which has applications in number theory as well as finite group theory, and its corollary Brauer's characterization of characters, which is central to the theory of group characters.

The Brauer–Fowler theorem, published in 1956, later provided significant impetus towards the classification of finite simple groups, for it implied that there could only be finitely many finite simple groups for which the centralizer of an involution (element of order 2) had a specified structure.

Brauer introduced the idea of "resolvent degree" in 1975. He applied modular representation theory to obtain subtle information about group characters, particularly via his three main theorems. These methods were particularly useful in the classification of finite simple groups with low rank Sylow 2-subgroups. The Brauer–Suzuki theorem showed that no finite simple group could have a generalized quaternion Sylow 2-subgroup, and the Alperin–Brauer–Gorenstein theorem classified finite groups with wreathed or quasidihedral Sylow 2-subgroups. The methods developed by Brauer were also instrumental in contributions by others to the classification program: for example, the Gorenstein–Walter theorem, classifying finite groups with a dihedral Sylow 2-subgroup, and Glauberman's Z* theorem. The theory of a block with a cyclic defect group, first worked out by Brauer in the case when the principal block has defect group of order p, and later worked out in full generality by E. C. Dade, also had several applications to group theory, for example to finite groups of matrices over the complex numbers in small dimension. The Brauer tree is a combinatorial object associated to a block with cyclic defect group which encodes much information about the structure of the block.

Brauer formulated numerous influential problems on modular representation theory, among which the Brauer height zero conjecture and the k(B) conjecture.

In 1970, he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

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References

  • Review
  • Charles W. Curtis (2003) "Richard Brauer: Sketches from His Life and Work", American Mathematical Monthly 110:665&ndash;77.
  • James Alexander Green (1978) "Richard Dagobert Brauer", Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 10:317&ndash;42.
  • National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir