Schur's Zurich lecture on representation theory. (Q1423725)

In 1935, Issai Schur (1875-1941) had lost his position as a professor in Berlin. In February 1936, he was invited to the ETH Zurich in order to give a series of lectures on representation theory of finite groups. The notes for this course were taken and edited by Eduard Stiefel. According to Curtis, they form the first book devoted entirely to the theory of representations of finite groups. The paper under review reports on the background and contents of these notes. It includes a short biography of Schur and a brief summary of the book. Moreover, it presents in detail Schur's proofs of two basic results, now called Maschke's Theorem and Schur's Lemma. Schur follows the classical approach using matrices and avoids the then more recent methods developed by Noether and Artin. An appendix to the notes contains results on unitary representations of infinite groups. It is closely related to work of H. Weyl. The author speculates whether this appendix was added by Stiefel.