Alexandre Kirillov

Who is Alexandre Kirillov?

Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirillov is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, renowned for his works in the fields of representation theory, topological groups and Lie groups. In particular he introduced the orbit method into representation theory.

Kirillov studied at Moscow State University where he was a student of Israel Gelfand. His Ph.D. dissertation Unitary representations of nilpotent Lie groups 1962 was so successful that he was awarded the much higher degree of Doctor of Science instead. At the time he was the youngest Doctor of Science in the Soviet Union. He worked at the Moscow State University until 1994 when he became the Francis J. Carey Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania.

During his school years, Kirillov was a winner of many mathematics competitions, and he is still an active organizer of Russian mathematical contests. Kirillov is an author of many popular school-oriented books and articles.

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

Kirillov's son, Alexander Kirillov, Jr., is also a mathematician, working on the representation theory of Lie groups at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.