Victor Kac
Russian-American mathematician (1943-)
Victor Gershevich (Grigorievich) Kac (Russian: Виктор Гершевич (Григорьевич) Кац; born 19 December 1943) is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He co-discovered Kac–Moody algebras, and used the Weyl–Kac character formula for them to reprove the Macdonald identities. He classified the finite-dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra. He is also known for the Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures with Boris Weisfeiler.
Biography
Kac studied mathematics at Moscow State University, receiving his MS in 1965 and his PhD in 1968. From 1968 to 1976, he held a teaching position at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Machine Building (MIEM). He left the Soviet Union in 1977, becoming an associate professor of mathematics at MIT. In 1981, he was promoted to full professor. Kac received a Sloan Fellowship and the Medal of the Collège de France, both in 1981, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. He received the Wigner Medal (1996) "in recognition of work on affine Lie algebras that has had wide influence in theoretical physics". In 1978 he was an invited speaker (Highest weight representations of infinite dimensional Lie algebras) at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Helsinki.
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This entry incorporates text from “Victor Kac” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.