Bertram Kostant

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Bertram Kostant is a leading American mathematician.

Kostant grew up in New York City, where he graduated from the celebrated Stuyvesant High School in 1945.^[1] He went on to obtain an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1950. He earned his Ph.D. in 1954, under the direction of Irving Segal, where he wrote a dissertation on representations of Lie groups. After stints at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, and UC Berkeley, he joined the faculty at MIT, where he remained until his retirement in 1993.

Kostant's work has involved many of the most beautiful ideas in modern mathematics, such as representation theory, Lie groups, Lie algebras, homogeneous spaces, differential geometry and mathematical physics, particularly symplectic geometry. He has been one of the principal developers of the theory of geometric quantization. His introduction of the theory of prequantization has led to a remarkable theory of quantum Toda lattices. The Kostant partition function is named after him.

Kostant's many honors include election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978. His students include James Lepowsky,Moss Sweedler, David Vogan, and Birgit Speh. At present he has almost 90 mathematical descendants.

[edit] References

• Kostant's home page at MIT
• Mathematics genealogy project
• Brylinski, Jean-Luc (editor) (1994). Lie Theory and Geometry, In Honor of Bertram Kostant. Boston, Birkhauser. ISBN 0-8176-3761-3.