George Lusztig

George Lusztig (born Gheorghe Lusztig, May 20, 1946) is a Romanian-American mathematician and Abdun Nur Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a Norbert Wiener Professor with the Department of Mathematics from 1999 to 2009.

Education and career

Born in Timişoara, he did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bucharest. He left Romania for the United States, where he went to work for two years with Michael Atiyah at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His early work was on the index theory of elliptic operators, which was the topic of his 1971 doctorate at Princeton University, under the direction of William Browder.^[1]

Lusztig worked for almost seven years at the University of Warwick. His involvement at the university encompassed a Research Fellowship, (1971–72); lecturer in Mathematics, (1972–74); and Professor of Mathematics, (1974–78). In 1978, he accepted a chair at MIT.^[2][3]

Contributions

He is known for his work on representation theory, in particular for algebraic groups. This has included fundamental new concepts, including the Deligne–Lusztig variety and the Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomials.^[4]

Awards and honors

In 1983, Lusztig was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society.^[5] In 1985 Lusztig won the Cole Prize (Algebra). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992, received the Brouwer Medal in 1999 and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics in 2008. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[6] In 2014 he received the Shaw Prize in Mathematics.^[7]

References

External links

• George Lusztig's results at the International Mathematical Olympiad
• George Lusztig's entry in the International Who's Who.