Irving Segal

Irving Ezra Segal (1918 to 1998) was an American mathematician best known for work motivated by theoretical quantum mechanics. Born in the Bronx and raised in Trenton, he entered Princeton at sixteen, took his doctorate at Yale in 1940 under Einar Hille, and later held posts at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Chicago and, from 1960 until his death, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Early in his career he became known for developments in quantum field theory and in functional and harmonic analysis, including the algebraic axioms later called C-star algebras, and he shares credit for the Segal-Shale-Weil representation. In later life he developed chronometric cosmology, an alternative to the Big Bang picture that attributes the cosmological redshift to the curvature of space; the theory has not found favour with astrophysicists. He supervised about forty doctoral students and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1973.