George Mackey
| George Mackey | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | February 1, 1916 St. Louis, Missouri |
| Died |
March 15, 2006 (aged 90) Belmont, Massachusetts |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Rice University, Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Marshall H. Stone |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Mathematics |
| Sub discipline | locally convex space |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
George Whitelaw Mackey (February 1, 1916 – March 15, 2006) was an American mathematician. Mackey earned his bachelor of arts at Rice University (then the Rice Institute) in 1938 and obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1942 under the direction of Marshall H. Stone. He joined the Harvard University Mathematics Department in 1943, was appointed Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science in 1969 and remained there until he retired in 1985.
Earlier in his career Mackey did significant work in the duality theory of locally convex spaces, which provided tools for subsequent work in this area, including Alexander Grothendieck's work on topological tensor products.
Mackey was one of the pioneer workers in the intersection of quantum logic, the theory of infinite-dimensional unitary representations of groups, the theory of operator algebras and noncommutative geometry. A central role in Mackey's work, both in the theory of group representations and in mathematical physics, was played by the concepts of system of imprimitivity and induced representation. This idea led naturally to an analysis of the representation theory of semi-direct products in terms of ergodic actions of groups and in some cases a complete classification of such representations. Mackey's results were essential tools in the study of the representation theory of nilpotent Lie groups using the method of orbits developed by Alexandre Kirillov in the 1960s. His notion of "virtual subgroup", introduced in 1966 using the language of groupoids, had a significant influence in ergodic theory.
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