Description

Richard Brauer (1901-1977) was one of the leading algebraists of this century. Although he contributed to a number of mathematical fields, Brauer devoted the major share of his efforts to the study of finite groups, a subject of considerable abstract interest and one that underlies many of the more recent advances in combinatorics and finite geometries. The 120 papers collected in this volume were first published between 1926 and 1979. Brauer's mathematical impulse was remarkably steady, and his papers are equally distributed between those written before his fiftieth year and those written thereafter, including a number of contributions that were published after his formal retirement as Perkins Professor of Mathematics as Harvard in 1971. The papers are grouped into six sections following an autobiographical preface written for this collection. The first section contains twenty papers on the theory of algebras and is introduced by Oscar Goldman. The seventy-four papers on finite groups make up the second and largest section, which spans all three volumes. The final four sections complete the third volume and represent Brauer's contribution to Lie groups, number theory, polynomials and equations, geometries and biographies of Artin and Thompson.