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12 Facts About Victor Kac

1.

Victor Gershevich Kac is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory.

2.

Victor Kac classified the finite-dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra.

3.

Victor Kac left the Soviet Union in 1977, becoming an associate professor of mathematics at MIT.

4.

Victor Kac received a Sloan Fellowship and the Medal of the College de France, both in 1981, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986.

5.

Victor Kac received the Wigner Medal "in recognition of work on affine Lie algebras that has had wide influence in theoretical physics".

6.

Victor Kac was a plenary speaker at the 1988 American Mathematical Society centennial conference.

7.

Victor Kac is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, an honorary member of the Moscow Mathematical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

8.

Victor Kac's work appears in mathematics and physics and in the development of quantum field theory, string theory and the theory of integrable systems.

9.

Victor Kac has published 13 books and over 200 articles in mathematics and physics journals and is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.

10.

Victor Kac was awarded the 2015 AMS Leroy P Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

11.

Victor Kac was married with Michele Vergne and they have a daughter, Marianne Kac-Vergne, who is a professor of American civilization at the university of Picardie.

12.

Victor Kac's brother Boris Katz is a principal research scientist at MIT.