George Mostow

George Mostow (full name: George Daniel Mostow) is an American mathematician, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Henry Ford II (emeritus) Professor of Mathematics at Yale University, the 49th President of the American Mathematical Society (1987–1988), and former Trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, who is renowned for his contributions to Lie theory. In 1993 he was awarded the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. The rigidity phenomenon for lattices in Lie groups he discovered and explored is known as Mostow rigidity. His work on rigidity played an essential role in the work of three Fields medalists, namely Grigori Margulis, William Thurston, and Grigori Perelman.

Short biography

George (Dan) Mostow was born in 1923. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1948. His principal academic appointments had been at Johns Hopkins University from 1952 to 1961 and at Yale University from 1961 until his retirement in 1999. Mostow was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974, served as the President of the American Mathematical Society in 1987 and 1988, and was awarded the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research in 1993 for his book Strong rigidity of locally symmetric spaces (1973).

See also

• Strong rigidity
• Superrigidity
• Mostow decomposition
• Hochschild-Mostow Functor
• Margulis arithmeticity
• Hochschild–Mostow group

References

• Science 20 October 1978: Vol. 202. no. 4365, pp. 297 – 298.
• Pierre Deligne and Daniel Mostow, Commensurabilities among lattices in PU(1,n). Annals of Mathematics Studies, 132. Princeton University Press, 1993 ISBN 0-691-00096-4
• Roger Howe, editor, Discrete groups in geometry and analysis. Papers in Honor of G. D. Mostow on His Sixtieth Birthday (Conference held at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, March 23–25, 1986), Progress in Mathematics, Vol. 67. Birkhäuser, Boston–Basel–Stuttgart ISBN 0-8176-3301-4
• George Mostow, Strong rigidity of locally symmetric spaces, Annals of Mathematics Studies, no. 78, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1973
• Alexander Lubotsky, Tannaka duality for discrete groups. American Journal of Mathematics Vol. 102, pp. 663 – 689, 1980

External links

• AMS Presidents: A Timeline at the American Mathematical Society website.