Lajos Pukánszky

Lajos Pukánszky (born November 24, 1928 in Budapest , † February 15, 1996 in Philadelphia ) was a Hungarian-American mathematician who dealt with the functional analysis and representation theory of Lie groups .

Pukánszky studied at the University of Debrecen , the University of Budapest and the University of Szeged , where he received his doctorate in 1955 under Béla Sz.-Nagy . During the Hungarian uprising in 1956 he left Hungary and went via Yugoslavia to the USA in 1957, where he was at the newly founded Research Institute for Advanced Study in Baltimore , from 1960 Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park , from 1961 Visiting Assistant Professor from Stanford University and from 1962 Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles . In 1964 he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania , where he stayed until his retirement. He died of complications from anemia . In the 1960s he was visiting professor in Paris with Jacques Dixmier , with whom he had corresponded since 1953.

Pukánszky was considered a leading expert on dissolvable Lie groups. He initially dealt with Von Neumann algebras . In 1956 he constructed two non-isomorphic Type III factors , an important advance at the time. In the 1960s he improved the orbit method introduced by Alexander Alexandrowitsch Kirillow in 1962 , which allows the unitary irreducible representations of certain Lie groups to be classified (shown in lectures published in Paris in 1967). A condition found and named after him allowed the extension of the orbit method by Kirillov from originally nilpotent groups to solvable Lie groups. The culmination of this series of works, which began in 1967, was a major essay in 1971. Later he dealt with unitary representations of general, connected Lie groups.

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Nice (New results in the representation theory of solvable groups).

In 1988 a conference was held at the University of Copenhagen on his 60th birthday ( The orbit method in representation theory , Progress in Mathematics, Birkhäuser 1988).

Fonts

• Lecons sur la representations des groups, Monographies de la SMF, Vol. 2, Paris, Dunod 1967
• Characters of connected Lie groups, American Mathematical Society 1999

Web links

• Obituary page at the University of Pennsylvania
• Jacques Dixmier, Michel Duflo, András Hajnal, Richard Kadison, Adam Korányi, Jonathan Rosenberg, Michèle Vergne: Lajos Pukánszky (1928–1996) , Notices of the AMS, April 1998, pp. 492–499, PDF file

References

1. ↑ Jonathan Rosenberg, Obituary in Notices AMS, 1998
2. ↑ Some examples of factors, Pub. Math. Debrecen, Vol. 4, 1956, p. 135.
3. ↑ Pukánszky condition, first in Pukánszky On the theory of exponential groups , Transactions AMS, Vol. 126, 1967, p. 487
4. ↑ Unitary representations of solvable Lie groups , Annales Scientifique École Normale Superieure, Vol. 4, 1971, pp. 457-608.
5. ↑ beginning with Characters of connected Lie groups , Acta Mathematica, Vol. 133, 1974, pp. 81-137.