Victor Guillemin

Victor William Guillemin is an American mathematician. He works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of symplectic geometry, and he has also made contributions to the fields of microlocal analysis, spectral theory, and mathematical physics.

Education and career

Guillemin obtained a B.A. at Harvard University in 1959, as well as an M. A. at the University of Chicago in 1960. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1962; his dissertation, entitled Theory of Finite G-Structures, was written under the direction of Shlomo Sternberg.
He worked at Columbia University from 1963 to 1966 and then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as assistant professor. He became associate professor in 1969 and full professor in 1973.

Awards and honors

Guillemin was awarded in 1969 a Sloan Research Fellowship, in List of [Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 1988|1988] a Guggenheim fellowship and in 1996 a Humboldt fellowship. In 1970 he was List of [International Congresses of Mathematicians Plenary and Invited Speakers#1970, Nice|invited speaker] at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice.
He was elected a fellow of the American [Academy of Arts and Sciences] in 1984 and of the United States [National Academy of Sciences] in 1985. In 2003, he was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the American Mathematical Society. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Research

Guillemin worked in several areas in analysis and geometry, including microlocal analysis, symplectic group actions, and spectral theory of elliptic operators on manifolds.
He is the author or co-author of numerous books and monographs, including a widely used textbook on differential topology, written jointly with Alan Pollack in 1974, and a monograph on symplectic geometry in physics, written jointly with Shlomo Sternberg in 1986.

Family

Victor Guillemins's uncle Ernst Guillemin was a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, his younger brother Robert Charles Guillemin was a sidewalk artist, his brother-in-law Ray Raphael is an historian, and his daughter Karen Guillemin is a Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon.

Selected publications

; reprinted in 1990 as an