George Mackey 1916-2006

摘要

George Whitelaw Mackey died of complications from pneumonia on March 15, 2006, in Belmont, Massachusetts, at the age of ninety. He was a remarkable individual and mathematician who made a lasting impact not only on the theory of infinite dimensional group representations, ergodic theory, and mathematical physics but also on those individuals with whom he personally came into contact. The purpose of this article is to celebrate and reflect on George's life by providing a glimpse into his mathematics and his personality through the eyes of several colleagues, former students, family, and close friends. Each of the contributors to the article has his or her own story to tell regarding how he influenced their lives and their mathematics. I first became aware of George Mackey forty-five years ago through his now famous 1955 Chicago lecture notes on group representations and also through his early fundamental work on the duality theory of locally convex topological vector spaces. I had taken a substantial course in functional analysis, and Mackey's Chicago notes were a rather natural next step resulting from my interest in C*-algebras and von Neumann algebras-an interest instilled in me by Henry Dye and Sterling Berberian, both inspiring teachers who, at the time, were themselves fairly young Chicago Ph.D.'s. I purchased a copy of Mackey's notes through the University of Chicago mathematics department and had them carefully bound in hard cover. They became my constant companion as I endeavored to understand this beautiful and difficult subject In this regard it is certainly not an exaggeration to say that Mackey's notes were often the catalyst that led many mathematicians to study representation theory.