Alexandre Kirillov

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Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirillov (Russian: Александр Александрович Кириллов, born 1936) is a Russian mathematician, renowned for his works in the field of Representation theory, Topological groups and Lie groups.

Alexandre Kirillov studied at Moscow State University where he was a student of Israel Gelfand. His PhD (kandidat) dissertation Unitary representations of nilpotent Lie groups 1962 was so successful that he was awarded the much higher degree of Doctor of Science instead. At the time he was the youngest Doctor of Science in the Soviet Union. He worked at the Moscow State University until 1994 when he became the Francis J. Carey Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania.

According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project sixty-three mathematicians were his students and 123 are his "descendants" (either his students or students of his students). According to the researchers from the Northern Illinois University, he is one of the three hundred fifty seven people whose names are embedded in the Mathematics Subject Classification: class 16P90 is "Growth rate, Gelfand-Kirillov dimension".

During his school years, Kirillov was a winner of many mathematics competitions, and he is still an active organizer of Russian mathematical contests. Alexandre Kirillov is an author of many popular school-oriented books and articles.

Alexandre Kirillov's son, Alexander Kirillov Jr is also a notable mathematician, working in the area of the Representation Theory and Lie Groups.