Simons Fellow George Lusztig Receives Lifetime Award From International Congress of Basic Science

The International Congress of Basic Science has named Simons Fellow George Lusztig as one of this year’s recipients of its Basic Science Lifetime Award (BSLA) in Mathematics. Lusztig was selected as a Simons Fellow in Mathematics in 2012 and again in 2021.

Lusztig, an emeritus professor of mathematics at MIT, was honored “for his unparalleled contributions to representation theory, and the profound influence of the theory of Deligne–Lusztig varieties, and Kazhdan–Lusztig theory.”

Regarded as a pioneer in representation theory, Lusztig made critical advancements in objects closely related to algebraic groups, such as finite reductive groups, Hecke algebras, p-adic groups, quantum groups and Weyl groups.

Lusztig graduated from the University of Bucharest and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He joined the MIT mathematics faculty in 1978 following a professorship appointment at the University of Warwick in England. His other accolades include the AMS Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the AMS Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra, the Shaw Prize and the Wolf Prize.