Walther Franz Anton von Dyck, born Dyck and later ennobled, was a German mathematician. He is credited with being the first to define a mathematical group, in the modern sense in. He laid the foundations of combinatorial group theory, being the first to systematically study a group by generators and relations.

In mathematics, a group is a set with an operation that satisfies the following constraints: the operation is associative and has an identity element, and every element of the set has an inverse element.