Rimhak Ree (alternative spelling: Im-hak Ree, December 18, 1922 – January 9, 2005) was a Korean Canadian mathematician. He contributed in the field of group theory, most notably with the concept of the Ree group in . Early life Ree received his early education in Hamhung, South Hamgyong, in what is now North Korea; he attended the Hamhung #1 Public Ordinary School (), and in 1934 entered the Hamhung Public High School (). He went onto Keijō Imperial University, where he studied physics, which was an unusual choice for Koreans at the time. Ree graduated in 1944 with a physics degree; he then went to Fengtian, Manchukuo (today Shenyang, Liaoning in the People's Republic of China) to work for an aircraft company. Career After the surrender of Japan in 1945 and the end of Japanese rule in Korea, Ree returned to his home country and in 1947 took up a teaching position in the mathematics department at Seoul National University as an assistant professor. Later that year, in Namdaemun Market, Ree found an issue of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, which proposedly was left by an American soldier. On the Bulletin was the paper 'Note on power series', in which Max Zorn solved a problem about the convergence of certain power series with complex coefficients. In the paper, Zorn posed a question of whether the same result held for power series with real coefficients. Ree solved the problem and sent the solution to Max Zorn. When Zorn received Ree's solution, it was sent to the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society to be published in 1949 with the title 'On a problem of Max Zorn' and become the first mathematical paper published by a Korean in an international journal. During the Korean War, he fled south to Busan, and in 1953 he was awarded a Canadian Scholarship to allow him to study for a Ph.D. degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He completed his dissertation on Witt algebras in 1955. His thesis advisor was Stephen Arthur Jennings. Following the award of his doctorate, Ree was appointed as a lecturer at Montana State University, despite facing several problems regarding his labour permission and nationality. In mid-1955, Ree received a grant from the National Research Council of Canada and he worked with Jennings on Lie algebras. In 1958, he published a solution to a problem of