| Citation | Distinguished for his contributions to the theory of finite groups. With Feit he proved the long-standing conjecture that every group of odd order is soluble, a result for which he received a Fields Medal in 1970. The recent revival of the theory of finite groups, and above all the exciting progress towards the determination of all finite simple groups, would have been impossible without his deep and original methods. We point in particular to the series of six very substantial papers "Nonsolvable finite groups all of whose local subgroups are solvable" in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society and the Pacific Journal of Mathematics, in which he determines all "minimal" finite simple groups. |