Bertram Kostant Editor & Author

​Bertram Kostant was Professor Emeritus at MIT. He died on February 2, 2017 at 88 years old. Kostant was of one of the major architects of modern Lie theory and virtually all of his papers are pioneering with deep consequences, many giving rise to whole new fields of activities. His interests spanned a tremendous range of Lie theory, from differential geometry to representation theory, abstract algebra, and mathematical physics. He also had a long standing love affair with the icosahedron. Bertram Kostant was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, became a Sackler Institute Fellow at Tel Aviv University in 1982, received a medal from the College de France in 1983. In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He was awarded the Steele Prize in 1990 for his paper On the existence and irreducibility of certain series of representations; paper #36 in Volume II of Kostant’s Collected Papers. In 2016 he received the Wigner Medal in Rio de Janeiro. During his mathematical career, Kostant received several honorary doctorates.