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Richard Brauer formulated a method to classify all finite simple groups and spend the rest of his life working on this problem.
Brauer studied at Berlin under the supervision of Issai Schur. He then taught at Königsberg until 1933.
Political events force a move and he accepted a post at the University of Toronto in Canada. In 1948 he moved to the USA holding posts at the University of Michigan (1948-1952) and Harvard University (1952-1971).
Brauer's early mathematical work involved a collaboration with Hermann Weyl on spinors. This work was to provide a background for the work of Paul Dirac in his exposition of the theory of the spinning electron within the framework of quantum mechanics.
Brauer then became interested in the work of Ferdinand Frobenius, in particular his work on group characters published in 1896. Brauer carried Frobenius's ordinary characters (where the characteristic of the field does not divide the order of the group) to the case of modular characters (where the characteristic does divide the group order).
In the late 1950's he began to formulate a method to classify all finite simple groups. Brauer was to spend the rest of his life working on this problem. He died before the classification was complete but his work provided the framework of the classification which was completed only a few years later.
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