George Mackey

George Whitelaw Mackey was an American mathematician, born in 1916, known for his contributions to quantum logic, representation theory and noncommutative geometry. He earned a B.A. at Rice University in 1938 and a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1942 under the direction of Marshall H. Stone, joined the Harvard mathematics department in 1943, became Landon T. Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science in 1969 and retired in 1985. Early work concerned the duality theory of locally convex spaces; he later worked on infinite-dimensional unitary representations of groups, systems of imprimitivity, induced representations, and the notion of a virtual subgroup, which influenced ergodic theory.