Lajos Pukánszky

Lajos Pukánszky (born 24 November 1928 Budapest, † 15 February 1996 in Philadelphia ) was a Hungarian- American mathematician who worked on the functional analysis and representation theory of Lie groups.

Pukánszky studied at the University of Debrecen, the University of Budapest and Szeged University, where he earned his doctorate at Béla Sz -Nagy in 1955. During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he left Hungary and went to Yugoslavia in 1957 in the USA, where he was in Baltimore at the newly founded Research Institute for Advanced Study, 1960 Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, 1961 Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University and since 1962 Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1964 he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he remained until his retirement. He died from the effects of anemia. In the 1960s, he was a visiting professor in Paris at Jacques Dixmier, with whom he corresponded since 1953.

Pukánszky was considered a leading expert on solvable Lie groups. He dealt first with von Neumann algebras. In 1956, he constructed two non- isomorphic factors of type III, then an important step forward. He improved in the 1960s, the 1962 introduced Orbit method of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kirillov, which allows to classify the unitary irreducible representations of certain Lie groups (shown in 1967 published in Paris lectures). A found and named after him condition allowed the expansion of the orbit method of Kirillov originally nilpotent groups resolvable Lie groups. The culmination of this series of papers beginning in 1967 was a great essay in 1971. Later he dealt with unitary representations of general continuous Lie groups.

In 1970 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM ) in Nice (New results in the representation theory of solvable groups).

In 1988, on his 60th birthday, a conference at the University of Copenhagen held (The orbit method in representation theory, Progress in Mathematics, Birkhauser, 1988).

Writings

• Lecons sur la representations of groups, Monographies de la SMF, Vol.2, Paris, Dunod 1967
• Characters of connected Lie groups, American Mathematical Society 1999