Walter Feit
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Walter Feit (October 26, 1930 - July 29, 2004) was a mathematician who worked in finite group theory and representation theory.
He was born in Vienna and left for England in 1939; and moved to the United States in 1946 where he became an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, and became a professor at Cornell in 1952, and at Yale in 1964.
His most famous result is his joint, with John G. Thompson, proof of the Feit-Thompson theorem that all finite groups of odd order are solvable. At the time it was written, it was probably the most complicated and difficult proof ever completed. He wrote almost a hundred other papers, mostly on finite group theory and modular character theory.
He also wrote the books The representation theory of finite groups ISBN 0-444-86155-6 and Characters of finite groups, which are now standard references on modular character theory.
He was awarded the Cole Prize by the American Mathematical Society and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and was Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union.
