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

(MIT). He was a Norbert Wiener Professor in the Department of Mathematics from 1999 to 2009.

Education and career

Born in Timișoara to a Hungarian-Jewish family, he did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bucharest, graduating in 1968. Later that year he left Romania for the United Kingdom, where he spent several months at the

University of Warwick , mottoeng = Mind moves matter , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £7.0 million (2021) , budget = £698.2 million (2020 ...

and

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

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

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

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of w ...

. 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 imp ...

s", under the supervision of William Browder and Michael Atiyah. Lusztig worked for almost seven years at the

University of Warwick , mottoeng = Mind moves matter , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £7.0 million (2021) , budget = £698.2 million (2020 ...

. 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, in particular for the objects closely related to algebraic groups, 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 algebr ...

, 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 ...

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 polynomials.

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 one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics. Elementary ...

). He was elected to the

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 Nat ...

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, meeting ...

and in 2014 he received the

Shaw Prize The Shaw Prize is an annual award presented by the Shaw Prize Foundation. Established in 2002 in Hong Kong, it honours "individuals who are currently active in their respective fields and who have recently achieved distinguished and signifi ...

in Mathematics. In 2022, he received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

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 (1943-44 ...

''. {{DEFAULTSORT:Lusztig, George Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 20th-century Romanian mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Princeton University alumni Fellows of the Royal Society Brouwer Medalists Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars University of Bucharest alumni Romanian Jews Romanian emigrants to the United States Scientists from Timișoara Academics of the University of Warwick 1946 births Living people International Mathematical Olympiad participants 21st-century Romanian mathematicians Recipients of the National Order of Faithful Service