Victor Kac
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Victor G. Kac (born 19 December 1943 in Buguruslan, Russia) is an American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He discovered Kac–Moody algebras, and used the Weyl–Kac character formula for them to reprove the Macdonald identities. He classified the finite dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra.
Kac studied mathematics at Moscow State University, receiving his M.S. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968. From 1968 to 1976, he held a teaching position at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering[citation needed]. He left the Soviet Union in 1977, becoming an associate professor of mathematics at MIT. In 1981, he was promoted to full professor. Kac received a Sloan Fellowship in 1981 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.
His brother Boris Katz is a principal research scientist at MIT.
[edit] Books
- Kac, Victor G. (1994). Infinite-Dimensional Lie Algebras, 3rd edition, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-46693-8.
- Kac, Victor (1997). Vertex Algebras for Beginners (University Lecture Series, No 10). American Mathematical Society. ISBN 0-8218-0643-2.
