Wolfgang Gaschütz

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Wolfgang Gaschütz (11 June 1920 – 7 November 2016) was a German mathematician who specialized in group theory, especially finite groups. He was born in Karlshof, Oderbruch, and moved with his family to Berlin in 1931. He finished school in 1938 and served as an artillery officer in World War II. After the war he began studying at the University of Kiel, inspired by Andreas Speiser’s book on finite groups. He earned a Ph.D. in 1949 under Karl-Heinrich Weise with a thesis on subgroups of finite groups and completed his habilitation in 1953.

At Kiel he held several academic positions from 1949 until his retirement in 1988, becoming full professor in 1964. He chose to stay in Kiel rather than accept offers from other universities. He also worked as a visiting professor at many universities in Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Gaschütz helped build a strong school of group theory in Kiel, filling a gap in algebra after the death of Ernst Steinitz. He is best known for work on Frattini subgroups, complementability, group cohomology, and finite solvable groups. Key results include a 1959 formula related to the Eulerian function introduced by Hall and a 1962 theory of formations that unifies Hall and Carter subgroups. He also studied solvable T-groups and contributed to the development of Fitting and Schunk class theories. He organized Oberwolfach group theory conferences with colleagues Huppert and Gruenberg.

In 2000 he received an honorary doctorate from Francisk Skorina Gomel State University in Belarus. His doctoral students included Joachim Neubüser. He married Gudrun in 1943; they had a son and two daughters. Gaschütz died in Kiel in 2016 at the age of 96.