Gary Michael Seitz

Who is Gary Michael Seitz?

Gary Michael Seitz is an American mathematician a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Mathematics at the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1968, where his adviser was Charles W. Curtis. Seitz specializes in the study of algebraic and finite groups. Seitz has been active in the effort to exploit the relationship between algebraic groups and the finite groups of Lie type, in order to study the structure and representations of groups in the latter class. Such information is important in its own right, but was also critical in the classification of the finite simple groups, a major achievement of 20th century mathematics. Seitz made contributions to the classification of finite simple groups, such as those containing standard subgroups of Lie type. Following the classification, he pioneered the study of the subgroup structure of simple algebraic groups, and as an application went a long way towards solving the maximal subgroup problem for finite groups. For this work he received the Creativity Award from the National Science Foundation in 1991.