Charles Whittlesey Curtis (born October 13, 1926) is a mathematician and historian of mathematics, known for his work in finite group theory and representation theory. He is a retired professor of mathematics at the University of Oregon.

Curtis introduced Curtis duality, a duality operation on the characters of a reductive group over a finite field. His book with Irving Reiner (Curtis & Reiner 1962), was the standard text on representation theory for many years.

Curtis received a bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College in 1948,^[1] and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1951, under the supervision of Nathan Jacobson.^[2] He taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1954 to 1963.^[3] Subsequently, he moved to the University of Oregon, where he is an emeritus professor.^[4]

While at Yale, on June 17, 1950 in Cheshire, Connecticut, Curtis married his wife Elizabeth, a kindergarten teacher and childcare provider. At the time of their 50th anniversary in 2000, they had three grandchildren.^[5]

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[6]

• Curtis, Charles W. (1999), Pioneers of Representation Theory: Frobenius, Burnside, Schur, and Brauer, History of Mathematics, Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, ISBN 978-0-8218-2677-5.^{[7][8][9][10]}
• Curtis, Charles W.; Reiner, Irving (1962), Representation theory of finite groups and associative algebras, Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. XI, Interscience Publishers, a division of John Wiley & Sons, New York-London, ISBN 978-0-8218-4066-5, MR 0144979
• Curtis, Charles W.; Reiner, Irving (1981), Methods of representation theory. Vol. I, New York: John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-0-471-18994-7, MR 0632548^[11]
• Curtis, Charles W.; Reiner, Irving (1987), Methods of representation theory. Vol. II, New York: John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-0-471-88871-0^[12]
• Curtis, Charles W. (1974), Linear Algebra, Pearson Allyn & Bacon, ISBN 978-0205040087