Gustav Arnold Hedlund (May 7, 1904 – March 15, 1993), an American mathematician, was one of the founders of symbolic and topological dynamics.

He was a student of Marston Morse, under whose supervision he received a Ph.D. in 1930 with thesis entitled "I. Geodesics on a Two-Dimensional Riemannian Manifold with Periodic Coefficients II.

[2] He has over 200 academic descendants, many of them through two of his students at Virginia, Walter Gottschalk and W. Roy Utz, Jr.[3] One of Hedlund's early results was an important theorem about the ergodicity of geodesic flows.

[8] Hedlund was the co-author of the book Topological Dynamics (with Walter Gottschalk, American Mathematical Society, 1955).

The editor of the festschrift from the conference, Anatole Beck, wrote that it was "our token of respect to the man who did so much to foster and build this field".