Nathan Mendelsohn

Nathan Saul Mendelsohn, CM FRSC (April 14, 1917 – July 4, 2006) was an American-born mathematician who lived and worked in Canada.

Mendelsohn was a researcher in several areas of discrete mathematics, including group theory and combinatorics.

His paternal grandparents, Hyman Mendelsohn (1846–1928) and Hinda, née Silverstone (1859–1942) had originally immigrated to Montreal from Romania in 1898.

In 1918, he and his family moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, after a fire destroyed the tenement they were living in.

In 1938, he was on the University of Toronto team for the first Putnam Competition, along with Irving Kaplansky and John Coleman.

It was titled "A Group-Theoretic Characterization of the General Projective Collineation Group", and summarized in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

Mendelsohn also began practising magic tricks in high school as a means of steadying a tremor in his hands.

His citation reads, in part, that Mendelsohn is "known throughout the world as an authority in combinatorics, classical geometry and finite groups".