Shlomo Sternberg

Shlomo Zvi Sternberg was an American mathematician, born on 20 January 1936 and died on 23 August 2024, known for his work in geometry, particularly symplectic geometry and Lie theory, and for several well-known textbooks. He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1955 under Aurel Wintner, and joined the Harvard mathematics department in 1959, where he was George Putnam Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics until 2017. His first well-known result, from his thesis, is the Sternberg linearization theorem on making a smooth map linear near a hyperbolic fixed point. With Isadore Singer he revisited Elie Cartan work on infinite Lie pseudogroups, with Bertram Kostant he treated BRST quantization by reduction, and with Victor Guillemin he proved that quantization commutes with reduction, work connected to the convexity theorem for Hamiltonian torus actions that Michael Atiyah proved at the same time. He held a Guggenheim fellowship from 1974 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986.