Richard V. Kadison (1925–2018)

Abstract

Richard “Dick” V. Kadison, who died on August 22, 2018, almost single-handedly carried the torch for the subject of operator algebras during the 1950s. During the next decades Dick remained among the foremost leaders in the subject, nurturing it both by his deep scientific contributions and by attracting and energetically supporting younger mathematicians entering the subject. Dick Kadison at the conference “Operator Algebras and Related Topics” celebrating his 85th birthday, held in July 2010 at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. Image courtesy of Liming Ge (University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH). The historical context for Dick’s research is important. Coming out of the 1920s ferment involving the representation theory of compact groups, the theory of linear operators on Hilbert spaces, and the use by Heisenberg and Schroedinger of operators on Hilbert spaces in the formulations of quantum mechanics, J. von Neumann in the 1930s, often with his coauthor F. Murray, wrote a series of massive highly inventive and technical papers concerning a broad class of algebras of operators on Hilbert spaces, now known as “von Neumann algebras.” Then in 1943, out of the war-time Soviet Union emerged a remarkable paper by I. Gelfand and M. Naimark in which they launched the theory of a very closely related larger class of algebras of operators on Hilbert … [↵][1]1Email: rieffel{at}math.berkeley.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1