Victor Kac

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Victor Gershevich Kac [ kats ] (born December 19, 1943 in Buguruslan , Russia ) is a Russian-American mathematician.

Life

Kac studied at Lomonosov University in Moscow , where he graduated in 1965 and received his doctorate in 1968 from Ernest Vinberg with the dissertation Simple Irreducible Graded Lie Algebras of Finite Growth . After that he taught at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering (MIEМ) until 1976. In 1977 he emigrated to the USA, where he became an associate professor at MIT . In 1981 he received a full professorship there.

Kac is known for the discovery (with and independently of Robert Moody ) of the Kac-Moody algebras , infinite-dimensional generalizations of the finite-dimensional semi-simple Lie algebras , which are widely used in modern physics ( string theory ). Using the analogue of the Weyl character formula for these algebras, he proved the MacDonald identities (identities between infinite products and sums of products of powers in two variables). In 1975 he also classified the finite-dimensional Lie superalgebras.

Kac was a Sloan Research Fellow in 1981 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1986 . He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Mathematical Society . In 1996 he received the Wigner Medal . In 2002 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing (Classification of Supersymmetries) and in 1978 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Helsinki (Highest weight representations of infinite dimensional Lie algebras). He will receive the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2015 .

His brother Boris Katz is also a scientist at MIT ( Artificial Intelligence Research).

Fonts

  • Infinite-Dimensional Lie Algebras , 3rd Edition 1994, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-46693-8 .
  • Vertex Algebras for Beginners , American Mathematical Society, 1997 (University Lecture Series, No. 10), ISBN 0-8218-0643-2 .
  • Simple irreducible graded Lie algebras of finite growth Math. USSR Izvestija, Vol. 2, 1968, pp. 1271-1311 or in Russian Izv. Akad. Nauk USSR Ser. Mat., Vol. 32, 1968, pp. 1923-1967, Introduction of the Kac-Moody Algebras.
  • Classification of simple Lie Superalgebras , Functional Analysis and Applications, Volume 9, 1975, pp. 263-265
  • A sketch of Lie Superalgebra Theory , Communications in Mathematical Physics, Volume 53, 1977, pp. 31-64

literature

  • Stephen Berman, Karen Parshall : Victor Kac and Robert Moody- their paths to Kac-Moody-Algebras , Mathematical Intelligencer, 2002, No. 1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 2015 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prizes
personal data
SURNAME Kac, Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kac, Victor Gershevich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Buguruslan , Russia