Victor Kac

Who is Victor Kac?

Victor G. Kac is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He discovered Kac–Moody algebras, and used the Weyl–Kac character formula for them to reprove the Macdonald identities. He classified the finite dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra.

Kac studied mathematics at Moscow State University, receiving his M.S. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968. From 1968 to 1976, he held a teaching position at the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering. He left the Soviet Union in 1977, becoming an associate professor of mathematics at MIT. In 1981, he was promoted to full professor. Kac received a Sloan Fellowship in 1981 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. In 1996 he was the co-winner of the Wigner Medal. In 2002 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Beijing and in 1978 he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in Helsinki. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

His brother Boris Katz is a principal research scientist at MIT.