Ola Bratteli

Ola Bratteli (1946 to 2015) was a Norwegian mathematician who worked on operator algebras and their use in quantum statistical mechanics. Born in Oslo, he was the son of the Labour politician Trygve Bratteli, who became Prime Minister of Norway in 1971, and he studied mathematics at the University of Oslo under Erling Størmer. The dissertation he wrote for the cand.real degree, which corresponds to a modern master's thesis, proved so strong that his supervisor said it should have been a doctorate, and it became his 1974 doctoral thesis on inductive limits of finite dimensional C*-algebras. After time at the Courant Institute in New York and at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, where he began a long collaboration with Derek W. Robinson, he held a professorship in Trondheim from 1980 and moved to the University of Oslo in 1991. Their two volume book Operator Algebras and Quantum Statistical Mechanics, published in 1980, is described in the biography as the most cited textbook on its subject. In 2004 he shared the Research Council of Norway's Möbius Prize with Størmer for outstanding research on operator algebras.