Alexandre Kirillov

Alexandre Aleksandrovich Kirillov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Кири́ллов, born 1936) is a Soviet and Russian mathematician, known 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. (kandidat) dissertation Unitary representations of nilpotent Lie groups was published in 1962. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science. 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.

Publications