Walter Helbig Gottschalk (November 3, 1918 – February 15, 2004) was an American mathematician, one of the founders of topological dynamics.
[1][2] His father, Carl Gottschalk, was a German immigrant who worked as a machinist and later owned several small businesses in Salem; his younger brother, Carl W. Gottschalk, became a notable medical researcher.
[1][2] He died on February 15, 2004, in Providence, Rhode Island, where he had lived since his retirement.
[1] Gottschalk and his advisor Gustav Hedlund wrote the 1955 monograph Topological Dynamics.
[1][7][8] Other research contributions of Gottschalk include the first study of surjunctive groups[9] and a short proof of the De Bruijn–Erdős theorem on coloring infinite graphs.