Charles Newton Little (1858–1923) was an American mathematician and civil engineer.
[1][2] Little's father was a missionary to Madurai, in India, where Little was born in 1858;[3] his family returned with him to America in 1859.
[1][2] After this, he entered graduate study at Yale University, and completed his Ph.D. in 1885 under the supervision of Hubert Anson Newton, with a dissertation concerning knot theory.
[1] In 1899–1900 he went on leave from Stanford, and traveled to Germany to study mathematics with Felix Klein and David Hilbert.
[2][5] He died on September 7, 1923, of heart failure, in Berkeley, California.