in 1917–1918. His December 1918 presidential address, titled "Mathematics in War Perspective", criticized American mathematics for falling short of those of Britain, France, and Germany: "Let it not again become possible that thousands of young men shall be so seriously handicapped in their Army and Navy work by lack of adequate preparation in mathematics." In 1928, he was also the first recipient of the Cole Prize for algebra, awarded annually by the AMS, for his book Algebren und ihre Zahlentheorie. It appears that Dickson was a hard man: "A hard-bitten character, Dickson tended to speak his mind bluntly; he was always sparing in his praise for the work of others. ... he indulged his serious passions for bridge and billiards and reportedly did not like to lose at either game." "He delivered terse and unpolished lectures and spoke sternly to his students. ... Given Dickson's intolerance for student weaknesses in mathematics, however, his comments could be harsh, even though not intended to be personal. He did not aim to make students feel good about themselves." "Dickson had a sudden death trial for his prospective doctoral students: he assigned a preliminary problem which was shorter than a dissertation problem, and if the student could solve it in three months, Dickson would agree to oversee the graduate student's work. If not the student had to look elsewhere for an advisor." Work Dickson had a major impact on American mathematics, especially abstract algebra. His mathematical output consists of 18 books and more than 250 papers. The Collected Mathematical Papers of Leonard Eugene Dickson fill six large volumes. The algebraist In 1901, Dickson published his first book Linear groups with an exposition of the Galois field theory, a revision and expansion of his Ph.D. thesis. Teubner in Leipzig published the book, as there was no well-established American scientific publisher at the time. Dickson had already published 43 research papers in the preceding five years; all but seven on finite linear groups. Parshall (1991) described the book as follows: "Dickson presented a unified, complete, and general theory of the classical linear groups—not merely over the prime field GF(p) as Jordan had done—but over the general finite field GF(pn), and he did this against the backdrop of a well-developed theory of these underlying fields. ... his book represented the first systematic treatment of finite fields in the mathematical literature." An appendix in this book lists the