Sigurdur Helgason (mathematician)

Sigurdur Helgason
Sigurdur Helgason Sigurdur Helgason
Born	1927 (1927) (age 98) Akureyri, Iceland
Occupation	Icelandic mathematician
Awards	Leroy P. Steele Prize (1988)

This is an Icelandic name. The last name is a patronymic, not a family name; this person is properly referred to by the given name Sigurdur.

Sigurdur Helgason (born 1927) is an Icelandic-American mathematician whose research has been devoted to the geometry and analysis on symmetric spaces. In particular he has used new integral geometric methods to establish fundamental existence theorems for differential equations on symmetric spaces as well as some new results on the representations of their isometry groups. He also introduced a Fourier transform on these spaces and proved the principal theorems for this transform, the inversion formula, the Plancherel theorem and the analog of the Paley-Wiener theorem.

He was born in Akureyri, Iceland. In 1954 he earned a PhD from Princeton University under Salomon Bochner. Since 1965, Helgason has been a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He was winner of the 1988 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contributions for his books Groups and Geometric Analysis and Differential Geometry, Lie Groups and Symmetric Spaces. This was followed by the 2008 book Geometric Analysis on Symmetric Spaces.

He has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1970. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Selected works

Articles

• with A. Korányi:

Books

• Differential geometry and symmetric spaces. Academic Press 1962, AMS 2001
• Analysis on Lie groups and homogeneous spaces. AMS 1972
• Differential geometry, Lie groups and symmetric spaces. Academic Press 1978, 7th edn. 1995
• The Radon Transform. Birkhäuser, 1980, 2nd edn. 1999
• Topics in harmonic analysis on homogeneous spaces. Birkhäuser 1981
• Groups and geometric analysis: integral geometry, invariant differential operators and spherical functions. Academic Press 1984, AMS 1994
• Geometric analysis on symmetric spaces. AMS 1994, 2nd. edn. 2008

External links

• Sigurdur Helgason at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Sigurdur Helgason - Publications - MIT Mathematics