Feit-Thompson Theorem/Historical Note

Historical Note on Feit-Thompson Theorem

The Feit-Thompson Theorem originated as a conjecture of William Burnside in the $1911$ edition of his Theory of Groups of Finite Order, 2nd ed..

He had previously raised the question in the first ($1897$) edition of that work about the existence or not of a non-abelian simple group of odd order without actually predicting the outcome.

The question was settled by Walter Feit and John Griggs Thompson in their $1963$ paper in Pacific Journal of Mathematics.

Sources

• 1911: William Burnside: Theory of Groups of Finite Order (2nd ed.)

• 1978: John S. Rose: A Course on Group Theory ... (previous) ... (next): $1$: Introduction to Finite Group Theory: $1.12$
• 2008: David Nelson: The Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics (4th ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Feit-Thompson theorem