Marc Rieffel | |
---|---|
Born | Marc Rieffel December 22, 1937 |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Columbia University |
Known for | Noncommutative torus |
Scientific career | |
Fields | C*-algebras Quantum group theory Noncommutative geometry |
Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Doctoral advisor | Richard Kadison |
Doctoral students | Philip Green Jonathan Rosenberg |
Marc Aristide Rieffel is a mathematician noted for his fundamental contributions to C*-algebra [1] and quantum group theory. [2] He is currently a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 2012, he was selected as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society. [3]
Rieffel earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 1963 under Richard Kadison with a dissertation entitled A Characterization of Commutative Group Algebras and Measure Algebras.
Rieffel introduced Morita equivalence as a fundamental notion in noncommutative geometry and as a tool for classifying C*-algebras. [1] For example, in 1981 he showed that if Aθ denotes the noncommutative torus of angle θ, then Aθ and Aη are Morita equivalent if and only if θ and η lie in the same orbit of the action of SL(2, Z) on R by fractional linear transformations. [4] More recently, Rieffel has introduced a noncommutative analogue of Gromov-Hausdorff convergence for compact metric spaces which is motivated by applications to string theory. [5]
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