Richard Earl Block

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Richard Earl Block (born 1931) is a mathematician at the University of California, Riverside who works on Lie algebras over fields of prime characteristic.

Block earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1956 under the supervision of Abraham Adrian Albert. [1] He was the first to discover the central extension of the Witt algebra that gives the Virasoro algebra, though his discovery went unnoticed for many years. With Robert Lee Wilson he classified the simple Lie algebras over "well behaved" fields of finite characteristic.

In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. [2]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

Classification of finite simple groups Massive theorem assigning all but 27 finite simple groups to a few infinite families

In mathematics, the classification of the finite simple groups is a theorem stating that every finite simple group is either cyclic, or alternating, or it belongs to a broad infinite class called the groups of Lie type, or else it is one of twenty-six or twenty-seven exceptions, called sporadic. Group theory is central to many areas of pure and applied mathematics and the classification theorem has been called one of the great intellectual achievements of humanity. The proof consists of tens of thousands of pages in several hundred journal articles written by about 100 authors, published mostly between 1955 and 2004.

Monster group In mathematics, a finite simple group

In the area of abstract algebra known as group theory, the monster group M (also known as the Fischer–Griess monster, or the friendly giant) is the largest sporadic simple group, having order
   246 · 320 · 59 · 76 · 112 · 133 · 17 · 19 · 23 · 29 · 31 · 41 · 47 · 59 · 71
   = 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000
   ≈ 8×1053.

Simple group

In mathematics, a simple group is a nontrivial group whose only normal subgroups are the trivial group and the group itself. A group that is not simple can be broken into two smaller groups, namely a nontrivial normal subgroup and the corresponding quotient group. This process can be repeated, and for finite groups one eventually arrives at uniquely determined simple groups, by the Jordan–Hölder theorem.

Finite group Mathematical group based upon a finite number of elements

In abstract algebra, a finite group is a group whose underlying set is finite. Finite groups often arise when considering symmetry of mathematical or physical objects, when those objects admit just a finite number of structure-preserving transformations. Important examples of finite groups include cyclic groups and permutation groups.

Virasoro algebra

In mathematics, the Virasoro algebra is a complex Lie algebra, the unique central extension of the Witt algebra. It is widely used in two-dimensional conformal field theory and in string theory.

David Mumford American mathematician

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In mathematics, an affine Lie algebra is an infinite-dimensional Lie algebra that is constructed in a canonical fashion out of a finite-dimensional simple Lie algebra. It is a Kac–Moody algebra for which the generalized Cartan matrix is positive semi-definite and has corank 1. From a purely mathematical point of view, affine Lie algebras are interesting because their representation theory, like representation theory of finite-dimensional semisimple Lie algebras, is much better understood than that of general Kac–Moody algebras. As observed by Victor Kac, the character formula for representations of affine Lie algebras implies certain combinatorial identities, the Macdonald identities.

In mathematics, the complex Witt algebra, named after Ernst Witt, is the Lie algebra of meromorphic vector fields defined on the Riemann sphere that are holomorphic except at two fixed points. It is also the complexification of the Lie algebra of polynomial vector fields on a circle, and the Lie algebra of derivations of the ring C[z,z−1].

Group of Lie type

In mathematics, specifically in group theory, the phrase group of Lie type usually refers to finite groups that are closely related to the group of rational points of a reductive linear algebraic group with values in a finite field. The phrase group of Lie type does not have a widely accepted precise definition, but the important collection of finite simple groups of Lie type does have a precise definition, and they make up most of the groups in the classification of finite simple groups.

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Victor Gershevich (Grigorievich) Kac is a Soviet and American mathematician at MIT, known for his work in representation theory. He co-discovered Kac–Moody algebras, and used the Weyl–Kac character formula for them to reprove the Macdonald identities. He classified the finite-dimensional simple Lie superalgebras, and found the Kac determinant formula for the Virasoro algebra. He is also known for the Kac–Weisfeiler conjectures with Boris Weisfeiler.

In mathematics, a modular Lie algebra is a Lie algebra over a field of positive characteristic.

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Dmitry Fuchs

Dmitry Borisovich Fuchs is a Russian-American mathematician, specializing in the representation theory of infinite-dimensional Lie groups and in topology.

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