Alfred Brauer (1894-1985)

Alfred Brauer, a prominent Carolina mathematics professor, was a European Jew who fled Germany. An expert on number and matrix theory, Brauer taught at the University of Berlin during the 1930s, where he helped organize an anti-Nazi group. Fired from his job in 1935, he gained entry into the U.S. in 1939, where he began working at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. He came to Chapel Hill in 1942 and taught until his retirement in 1966. He founded the mathematics and physics library, which the university named for him in 1976. He earned numerous teaching prizes and a Kenan professorship.