Richard Earl Block (born 1931) is a mathematician at the

University of California, Riverside The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on in a suburban distr ...

who works on

Lie algebras In mathematics, a Lie algebra (pronounced ) is a vector space \mathfrak g together with an operation called the Lie bracket, an alternating bilinear map \mathfrak g \times \mathfrak g \rightarrow \mathfrak g, that satisfies the Jacobi identi ...

over

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s of prime characteristic. Block earned his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

from 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 1956 under the supervision of Abraham Adrian Albert. He was the first to discover the central extension of the

Witt algebra In mathematics, the complex Witt algebra, named after Ernst Witt, is the Lie algebra of meromorphic vector fields defined on the Riemann sphere that are holomorphic except at two fixed points. It is also the complexification of the Lie algebra ...

that gives the Virasoro algebra, though his discovery went unnoticed for many years. With Robert Lee Wilson he classified the simple Lie algebras over "well behaved" fields of finite characteristic. 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, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2012-11-10.

Selected publications

*Richard E. Block,
''On the Mills–Seligman axioms for Lie algebras of classical type''

Transactions of the American Mathematical Society The ''Transactions of the American Mathematical Society'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of mathematics published by the American Mathematical Society. It was established in 1900. As a requirement, all articles must be more than 15 p ...

, 121 (1966), pp. 378–392. (The paper that gives the central extension defining the Virasoro algebra.) *Richard E. Block and Robert Lee Wilson,
The Restricted Simple Lie Algebras are of Classical or Cartan Type

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Scien ...

August 15, 1984 vol. 81, no. 16, 5271–5274.

References

Living people 1931 births 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of Chicago alumni University of California, Riverside faculty Fellows of the American Mathematical Society {{US-mathematician-stub