Bertram Kostant

Bertram Kostant was an American mathematician who worked in representation theory, differential geometry and mathematical physics, born on May 24, 1928. He grew up in New York City, graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1945, obtained an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1950 and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1954 under the direction of Irving Segal. After time at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. His work involved Lie groups, Lie algebras, homogeneous spaces and symplectic geometry, and he was one of the principal developers of the theory of geometric quantization. The Kostant partition function is named after him. He died on February 2, 2017.