George (Gheorghe) Lusztig (born 1946) is a Romanian-born American mathematician. He is a Norbert Wiener Professor at the Department of Mathematics, MIT.

Born in Timişoara, he did his undergraduate studies at the University of Bucharest. He left Romania for the United States, where he went to work for two years with Michael Atiyah at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His early work was on the index theory of elliptic operators, which was the topic of his 1971 doctorate at Princeton University, under the direction of William Browder.

He worked for several years at the University of Warwick: Research Fellow, 1971-72; Lecturer in Mathematics, 1972-74; Professor of Mathematics, 1974-78. In 1978, he accepted a chair at MIT.

He is best known for his work on representation theory, in particular for algebraic groups. This has included fundamental new concepts, including the Deligne-Lusztig variety and the Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials.

He won the Cole Prize (Algebra) in 1985. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. He received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Mathematics in 2008.

[edit] External links

• George Lusztig at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Roger W. Carter, A survey of the work of George Lusztig, Nagoya Mathematical Journal 182 (2006), 1–45.