Charles Whittlesey Curtis (born October 13, 1926) is a mathematician and historian of mathematics, known for his work in finite group theory and representation theory. He is a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon.
Curtis introduced Curtis duality, a duality operation on the characters of a reductive group over a finite field. His book with Irving Reiner (Curtis & Reiner 1962), was the standard text on representation theory for many years.
Curtis received a bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1948,[1] and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1951, under the supervision of Nathan Jacobson.[2] He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1954 to 1963.[3] Subsequently, he moved to the University of Oregon, where he is an emeritus professor.[4]
While at Yale, on June 17, 1950 in Cheshire, Connecticut, Curtis married his wife Elizabeth, a kindergarten teacher and childcare provider. At the time of their 50th anniversary in 2000, they had three grandchildren.[5]
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[6]