Lajos Pukánszky

Who was Lajos Pukánszky?

Lajos Pukánszky was a Hungarian and American mathematician noted for his work in representation theory of solvable Lie groups. He was born in Budapest on November 24, 1928, defended his thesis in 1955 at the University of Szeged under Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy, but left Hungary in 1956. After taking several posts in the United States, in 1965 he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he stayed until his retirement. He gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice in 1970. In 1988 a conference entitled "The Orbit Method in Representation Theory" was held at the University of Copenhagen in honor of his sixtieth birthday. He died on February 15, 1996, in Philadelphia.