Michio Suzuki was one of the group of brilliant young Japanese mathematicians who entered college after World War II. He received his Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Tokyo in absentia. Prior to that he came to the University of Illinois in 1952 as a research fellow. He joined the faculty of the University in 1953, a position he held until his sudden death. His thesis was in the theory of finite groups, and this subject was to occupy him for his whole career. His early work included a study of the lattice of all subgroups L(G) of a group G . He proved that if G is a noncyclic simple finite group and H is a finite group with L(G×G) = L(H ×H), then G is isomorphic to H. At the time it was not known whether L(G) determines G up to isomorphism. However, by using the classification of the finite simple groups, it is possible to prove the more natural result that if G and H are noncyclic finite simple groups with L(G) = L(H), then G is isomorphic to H. (Consideration of a cyclic group G of prime order indicates why L(G×G) should always be much richer than L(G).) During the summer of 1952 he came to Ann Arbor, attracted by the presence of Richard Brauer, who was on the faculty there. Brauer was one of the very few senior mathematicians in the USA who worked on questions concerning the structure of finite simple groups. He and Brauer ran a seminar that summer, which John Walter and I and others attended. I met him in that seminar while I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. The theory of finite groups became a subject of intensive research during the next few years. One reason was John Thompson’s thesis, which introduced new methods and ideas to the subject; another was the progress in character theory sparked by Brauer and Suzuki. It is necessary here to make some definitions. By way of background, an important theorem due to Frobenius says that if H is a finite transitive permutation group such that the subgroup fixing a letter is nontrivial and no nonidentity element fixes two or more letters, then H contains a proper nontrivial normal subgroup M such that every nonidentity element x in M has centralizer CH (x) contained in M. All known proofs of this theorem use character theory. We use this theorem to make a definition: A finite group H is a Frobenius group Editor’s Note. Michio Suzuki, an early leader in the effort to classify finite simple groups, died May 31, 1998, in Tokyo at the age of seventy-one. Born October 2, 1926, in Japan, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1952, with Shoukichi Iyanaga as official advisor. Suzuki’s teachers included also Yasuo Akizuki and Kenkichi Iwasawa. Suzuki assumed a faculty position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, beginning the next year. In 1956–57 he took a leave of absence to work at Harvard University as research associate with Richard Brauer, with support from the National Science Foundation. He was a professor in the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois from 1968 until his death. Suzuki held a postdoctoral fellowship in 1952–53 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962–63, received the Academy Prize from the Japan Academy in 1974 for his work in group theory, and was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Kiel, Germany, in 1991. He had visiting appointments at the University of Chicago (1960–61); the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1962–63, 1968–69, and spring 1981); the University of Tokyo (spring 1971); the Universities of Hokkaido, Osaka, and Tokyo (1981 and 1985); and the University of Padua, Italy (1994).
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