Peter Engel Trapa is an American mathematician and inaugural Vice Provost and Senior Dean of the College and Schools of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (the U, U of U, or simply Utah) is a public university, public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. It was established in 1850 as the University of Deseret (Book of Mormon), Deseret by the General A ...

. His research focus is on the representation theory of reductive

Lie group In mathematics, a Lie group (pronounced ) is a group (mathematics), group that is also a differentiable manifold, such that group multiplication and taking inverses are both differentiable. A manifold is a space that locally resembles Eucli ...

s. Trapa received his Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and integrated science from

Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...

and his Ph.D. in mathematics from 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 ...

. While at MIT, Trapa studied representation theory with

David Vogan David Alexander Vogan Jr. (born September 8, 1954) is a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works on unitary representations of simple Lie groups. While studying at the University of Chicago, he became a Putnam Fellow i ...

. He completed postdoctoral work 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 ...

in Princeton, NJ, and

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

Career and Research

Trapa currently serves as the inaugural Vice Provost and Senior Dean of the College and Schools of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Previously, he served as Dean of the

College of Science A college (Latin: ''collegium'') may be a tertiary educational institution (sometimes awarding degrees), part of a collegiate university, an institution offering vocational education, a further education institution, or a secondary school ...

and College of Mines and Earth Sciences. Prior to that, he served chair of the Department of Mathematics and the chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy. Trapa works on unitary representations of

s, and is a member of the Atlas of Lie Groups project. With Jeffrey Adams, Marc van Leuuwen, and

, he devised an algorithm to compute the unitary dual of a real reductive group. With his collaborators, he developed a Shimura correspondence for split reductive groups and introduced a Dirac operator for p-adic spaces. He was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2019.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Trapa, Peter Living people American university and college faculty deans Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Northwestern University alumni 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 1974 births