Richard Donald Schafer (February 25, 1918 – December 28, 2014)[3] was an American mathematician.
He received in 1942 from the University of Chicago his PhD under Abraham Adrian Albert with dissertation Alternative Algebras over an Arbitrary Field.
Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1945, he was an instructor at the University of Michigan for the academic year 1945–1946.
He spent the academic year 1958–1959 at the Institute for Advanced Study.
He is best known for his textbook An Introduction to Nonassociative Algebras, first published in 1966,[1][5] which has been freely available since 2008 from Project Gutenberg.