Dieter Held (born 1936 in Berlin) is a German

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

.Mitgliederverzeichnis der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung e. V, 2007. He is known for discovering the

Held group In the area of modern algebra known as group theory, the Held group ''He'' is a sporadic simple group of order : 4,030,387,200 = 21033527317 : ≈ 4. History ''He'' is one of the 26 sporadic groups and was found by during an ...

, one of the 26 sporadic

finite simple group In mathematics, the classification of finite simple groups states that every finite simple group is cyclic, or alternating, or in one of 16 families of groups of Lie type, or one of 26 sporadic groups. The list below gives all finite simple g ...

s. Held was a speaker at the 1962

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

. He earned his Ph.D. in 1964 from

Goethe University Frankfurt Goethe University Frankfurt () is a public research university located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was founded in 1914 as a citizens' university, which means it was founded and funded by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt ...

, under the supervision of

Reinhold Baer Reinhold Baer (22 July 1902 – 22 October 1979) was a German mathematician, known for his work in algebra. He introduced injective modules in 1940. He is the eponym of Baer rings, Baer groups, and Baer subplanes. Biography Baer studied mecha ...

. From June 1965 to October 1967 Held first was lecturer at the Australian National University till July 1966 and then lecturer at Monash University, Clayton, Victoria. After having resigned from his position at Monash University, he returned to Germany and took up a research fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The discovery of the Held group occurred towards the end of 1968 after he had investigated the properties of an arbitrary finite simple group having a centralizer of an involution isomorphic to that of the centralizer of an involution in the center of a Sylow 2-subgroup of the Mathieu group M₂₄ on 24 letters. Shortly afterwards Graham Higman and John McKay demonstrated that such a group exists, using a computer. This demonstration has not been published. There is a much later paper by Jörg Hrabe de Angelis showing the existence and uniqueness of the Held group.Jörg Hrabe de Angelis, A presentation and a representation of the Held group, Arch. Math., Vol. 66, 265-275 (1996) Up to 2001, Held was professor at the Mathematics Institute of Gutenberg University in Mainz.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Held, Dieter 1936 births Living people 20th-century German mathematicians Group theorists Goethe University Frankfurt alumni Academic staff of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Academic staff of Monash University German expatriates in Australia Academic staff of the Australian National University Mathematicians from Berlin