Victor Kac

Victor G. Kac ( born December 19, 1943 in Buguruslan, Russia) is an American, Russian-born mathematician.

Kac studied at the Moscow State University in Moscow, where he graduated in 1965 and received his doctorate in 1968 with a thesis on Ernest Vinberg Simple Irreducible Graded Lie algebras of finite growth. Then he taught until 1976 at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology ( MIEE ). 1977 emigrated to the USA where he was Associate Professor at MIT. In 1981 he received a full professorship.

Kac is (with and independently of Robert Moody ) for the discovery of the Kac -Moody algebras known to find infinite-dimensional generalizations of semisimple finite-dimensional Lie algebras, which are often in modern physics ( string theory ) application. Using the analogue for Weyl character formula for these algebras, he proved MacDonald identities ( identities between infinite products and sums of products of powers in two variables). He also classified the finite dimensional Lie Superalgebren 1975.

Kac was 1981 Sloan Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow in 1986. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Mathematical Society. In 1996 he received the Wigner Medal. In 2002 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing ( Classification of Super Symmetries ), and in 1978 he was invited speaker at the ICM in Helsinki ( Highest weight representations of infinite dimensional Lie algebras ).

His brother Boris Katz is a scientist at MIT ( Artificial Intelligence Research ).