George Lusztig (born ''Gheorghe Lusztig''; May 20, 1946) is a Romanian-born American mathematician and Abdun Nur Professor at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT). He was a

Norbert Wiener Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher. He became a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT). A child prodigy, Wiener late ...

Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1999 to 2009.

Education and career

Born in

Timișoara Timișoara (, , ; , also or ; ; ; see #Etymology, other names) is the capital city of Timiș County, Banat, and the main economic, social and cultural center in Western Romania. Located on the Bega (Tisza), Bega River, Timișoara is consider ...

to a

Hungarian-Jewish The history of the Jews in Hungary dates back to at least the Kingdom of Hungary, with some records even predating the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895 CE by over 600 years. Written sources prove that Jewish communities lived i ...

family, he did his undergraduate studies at the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest (UB) () is a public university, public research university in Bucharest, Romania. It was founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princely Academy of Bucharest, P ...

, graduating in 1968. Later that year he left Romania for the United Kingdom, where he spent several months at the

University of Warwick The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded in 1965 as part of ...

and

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

. In 1969 he moved to the United States, where he went to work for two years with

Michael Atiyah Sir Michael Francis Atiyah (; 22 April 1929 – 11 January 2019) was a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry. His contributions include the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and co-founding topological K-theory. He was awarded the ...

at the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

Princeton, New Jersey The Municipality of Princeton is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, Borough of Princeton and Pri ...

. He received his PhD in mathematics in 1971 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Novikov's higher signature and families of

elliptic operator In the theory of partial differential equations, elliptic operators are differential operators that generalize the Laplace operator. They are defined by the condition that the coefficients of the highest-order derivatives be positive, which im ...

s", under the supervision of William Browder and

. Lusztig worked for almost seven years at the

. 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.

Contributions

He is known for his work on

representation theory Representation theory is a branch of mathematics that studies abstract algebra, abstract algebraic structures by ''representing'' their element (set theory), elements as linear transformations of vector spaces, and studies Module (mathematics), ...

, in particular for the objects closely related to

algebraic group In mathematics, an algebraic group is an algebraic variety endowed with a group structure that is compatible with its structure as an algebraic variety. Thus the study of algebraic groups belongs both to algebraic geometry and group theory. Man ...

s, such as finite reductive groups, Hecke algebras,

p

-adic groups,

quantum groups In mathematics and theoretical physics, the term quantum group denotes one of a few different kinds of noncommutative algebras with additional structure. These include Drinfeld–Jimbo type quantum groups (which are quasitriangular Hopf algebra ...

, and

Weyl group In mathematics, in particular the theory of Lie algebras, the Weyl group (named after Hermann Weyl) of a root system Φ is a subgroup of the isometry group of that root system. Specifically, it is the subgroup which is generated by reflections t ...

s. He essentially paved the way for modern representation theory. This has included fundamental new concepts, including the character sheaves, the Deligne–Lusztig varieties, and the

Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomial In the mathematical field of representation theory, a Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomial P_(q) is a member of a family of integral polynomials introduced by . They are indexed by pairs of elements ''y'', ''w'' of a Coxeter group ''W'', which can in parti ...

Awards and honors

In 1983, Lusztig was elected as a fellow of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

. In 1985 Lusztig won the

Cole Prize The Frank Nelson Cole Prize, or Cole Prize for short, is one of twenty-two prizes awarded to mathematicians by the American Mathematical Society, one for an outstanding contribution to algebra, and the other for an outstanding contribution to numbe ...

(

Algebra Algebra is a branch of mathematics that deals with abstract systems, known as algebraic structures, and the manipulation of expressions within those systems. It is a generalization of arithmetic that introduces variables and algebraic ope ...

). He was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

in 1992. He received the Brouwer Medal in 1999, the National Order of Faithful Service in 2003 and the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics in 2008. In 2012, he became a fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

and in 2014 he received the Shaw Prize in Mathematics. In 2022, he received the

Wolf Prize in Mathematics The Wolf Prize in Mathematics is awarded almost annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Medicine, Physics and Arts. ...

. In 2025, he received the Basic Science Lifetime award.

References

External links

*
George Lusztig's entry
in the ''

International Who's Who ''The International Who's Who'' is a Who's Who series of reference books of notable people worldwide that has been published annually since 1935. History The first edition was published in 1935 by Europa Publications. The eighth edition (1943– ...

''.
專訪 George Lusztig 教授 (Interview with Prof. George Lusztig, in Chinese)
in 數學傳播. {{DEFAULTSORT:Lusztig, George 1946 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 20th-century Romanian mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians 21st-century Romanian mathematicians Academics of the University of Warwick American people of Romanian-Jewish descent Brouwer Medalists Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the Royal Society Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars International Mathematical Olympiad participants Jewish American scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Princeton University alumni Recipients of the National Order of Faithful Service Romanian emigrants to the United States Romanian Jews Scientists from Timișoara University of Bucharest alumni Wolf Prize in Mathematics laureates