Moshe Flato

Moshé Flato (born September 17, 1937 in Tel Aviv , † November 27, 1998 in Paris ) was a French mathematician and theoretical physicist.

Life

Flato was born in Palestine as the son of Russian and Polish Jewish emigrants. At school he excelled in mathematics as well as music, took piano lessons from Daniel Barenboim's mother and hesitated for a while to become a concert pianist. From 1955 he studied physics and mathematics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Master's degree in physics in 1960). His studies with Giulio Racah brought him into contact with group theoretical methods early on . After graduation he was an officer in the Israeli Air Force, where he gave courses in mathematics, as well as at the Hebrew University. In 1961 he was also head of a theory group in Israeli reactor research and at the same time taught solid state physics at Bar Ilan University . In 1963/64 he was on a scholarship at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris and then at the University of Lyon . In 1965 he did his doctorate with André Lichnerowicz in Paris. In 1967 he became a French citizen and in 1968 he became a professor of mathematics at the University of Dijon .

Since his arrival in France in the 1960s, Flato had been an influential mathematical physicist, not least thanks to his energetic personality. In the 1960s, like many other physicists, he occupied himself with attempts to unite the Poincare group with internal symmetry groups in elementary particle theories, until this initially proved to be wrong by the theorems proven by Sidney Coleman and Jeffrey Mandula and others. Flato continued to work on the application of group theoretic methods in physics, for example with nonlinear differential equations.

In 1978, together with Daniel Sternheimer (a close colleague), Christian Fronsdal and André Lichnerowicz, he introduced the mathematical idea of ​​deformation quantization, in analogy to the correspondence of Poisson brackets to commutators in the transition from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics by Paul Dirac .

In 1980 he received the Saintour Prize from the Collège de France . From 1984 to 1992 he was on the scientific advisory board of the French insurance industry (Union des Assurances de Paris).

literature

• Giuseppe Dito, Daniel Sternheimer (eds.): Conférence Moshé Flato 1999. Quantization, deformations, and symmetries (= Mathematical Physics Studies. 21-22). 2 volumes. Kluwer, Dordrecht et al. 2000, ISBN 0-7923-6542-9 .

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Moshé Flato. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .

Remarks

1. ↑ As early as 1955, he was in the army and led a platoon as an officer, which was ambushed in Jordan and almost wiped out. As a result, Flato spent a month in the military prison.