Thomas Jones Enright (August 15, 1947 – January 27, 2019) was an American mathematician known for his work in the algebraic theory of

representations ''Representations'' is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press. The journal was established in 1983 and is the founding publication of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s. It ...

of real 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 ...

Biography

Enright received a B.S. from

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 ...

in 1969 and a Ph.D. in 1973 from the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

under the direction of Ramesh A. Gangolli. From 1973 to 1975 he was the Hedrick Assistant Professor in

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

working with Veeravalli S. Varadarajan, and spent the 1976-1977 year after in 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 ...

at Princeton, N. J. before starting at

University of California at San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Sc ...

in 1977. He was chair of the mathematics department of UCSD from 1986 to 1990. In 2010 he retired due to symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Contributions

In the mid-1970s, Enright introduced new methods that led him to an algebraic way of looking at

discrete series In mathematics, a discrete series representation is an irreducible unitary representation of a locally compact topological group ''G'' that is a subrepresentation of the left regular representation of ''G'' on L²(''G''). In the Plancherel measur ...

(which were fundamental representations constructed by

Harish-Chandra Harish-Chandra (né Harishchandra) FRS (11 October 1923 – 16 October 1983) was an Indian-American mathematician and physicist who did fundamental work in representation theory, especially harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups. Early ...

in the early 1960s), and to an algebraic proof of the Blattner multiplicity formula. He was known for Enright–Varadarajan modules, Enright resolutions, and the Enright completion

functor In mathematics, specifically category theory, a functor is a Map (mathematics), mapping between Category (mathematics), categories. Functors were first considered in algebraic topology, where algebraic objects (such as the fundamental group) ar ...

, which has had a lasting influence in algebra.

Recognition

* Recipient of

Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

, 1978 * Enright's work was the subject of a

Bourbaki Seminar Bourbaki(s) may refer to : Persons and science * Charles-Denis Bourbaki (1816–1897), French general, son of Constantin Denis Bourbaki * Colonel Constantin Denis Bourbaki (1787–1827), officer in the Greek War of Independence and serving in the ...

by Michel Duflo

Bibliography

* * * Enright, Thomas; Howe, Roger; Wallach, Nolan (1983-01-01). Trombi, P. C., ed. A Classification of Unitary Highest Weight Modules. Progress in Mathematics. Birkhäuser Boston. pp. 97–143. doi:10.1007/978-1-4684-6730-7_7. . * * * Enright, Thomas J.; Hunziker, Markus; Pruett, W. Andrew (2014-01-01). Howe, Roger; Hunziker, Markus; Willenbring, Jeb F., eds. Diagrams of Hermitian type, highest weight modules, and syzygies of determinantal varieties. Progress in Mathematics. Springer New York. pp. 121–184. doi:10.1007/978-1-4939-1590-3_6. . *

References

External links

*
Homepage of Thomas Jones Enright
{{DEFAULTSORT:Enright, Thomas Jones 1947 births 2019 deaths 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians University of California, San Diego faculty Harvard University alumni University of Washington alumni