Victor William Guillemin (born 1937 in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
) is an American
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
working in the field of
symplectic geometry
Symplectic geometry is a branch of differential geometry and differential topology that studies symplectic manifolds; that is, differentiable manifolds equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. Symplectic geometry has its origins in the ...
, who has also made contributions to the fields of
microlocal analysis,
spectral theory In mathematics, spectral theory is an inclusive term for theories extending the eigenvector and eigenvalue theory of a single square matrix to a much broader theory of the structure of operators in a variety of mathematical spaces. It is a result ...
, and
mathematical physics
Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The '' Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the developm ...
. He is a tenured Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...
. His uncle
Ernst Guillemin
Ernst Adolph Guillemin (May 8, 1898 – April 1, 1970) was an American electrical engineer and computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who spent his career extending the art and science of linear network analysis and synth ...
was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, and his daughter
Karen Guillemin is a Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon.
Professional career
Guillemin received a
Ph.D. in mathematics from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
in 1962, after earlier completing his
B. A.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...
at Harvard in 1959, as well as an
M. A.
A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...
at the
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
in 1960. His thesis, entitled ''Theory of Finite G-Structures,'' was written under the direction of
Shlomo Sternberg
Shlomo Zvi Sternberg (born 1936), is an American mathematician known for his work in geometry, particularly symplectic geometry and Lie theory.
Education and career
Sternberg earned his PhD in 1955 from Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis en ...
.
He is the author or co-author of numerous books and monographs, including a widely used textbook on
differential topology
In mathematics, differential topology is the field dealing with the topological properties and smooth properties of smooth manifolds. In this sense differential topology is distinct from the closely related field of differential geometry, which ...
, written jointly with Alan Pollack.
Awards and honors
He was elected to the
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, 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 N ...
in 1985. In 2003, he was awarded the
Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement by 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, meeting ...
. 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, meeting ...
.
Selected publications
*
*
*; reprinted in 1990 as a
on-line book*
*
*
See also
*
Zoll surface
In mathematics, particularly in differential geometry, a Zoll surface, named after Otto Zoll, is a surface homeomorphic to the 2-sphere, equipped with a Riemannian metric all of whose geodesics are closed and of equal length. While the usua ...
References
External links
*
*Victor Guillemin'
personal web page
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
20th-century American mathematicians
21st-century American mathematicians
Differential geometers
Topologists
Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty
Harvard College alumni
University of Chicago alumni
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Living people
1937 births
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
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