Web page for David Vogan

My office is Room 2-243, at MIT.
Telephone: 617-253-4991
E-mail: dav at math.mit.edu
Fax 617-253-4358.

Acknowledgements

I have followed the department's instructions for creating a home page, and copied the home page of Richard Melrose. I regret the inevitable errors that this process must have introduced.

Pictures

I am very proud and deeply sad to offer a few pictures of Fokko du Cloux.

Like everyone in the world, I play a small part in a YouTube video. Since the video is less than fifteen minutes long, I look forward to more fame in the future.

There is a small collection of family pictures; separately you can look at Venice, where Lois and I celebrated our 30th anniversary, (or with small pictures.) Lois and Allison's trip to see Jonathan in Brazil, a collection of math-related pictures, and (at the instigation of Tony Chiang) a collection of studio portraits of me. There are also pictures from my trip to China in July and August of 2004; these are also available as small pictures.

Teaching

Spring 2008:

Representations of Lie Groups (18.757).

Spring 2007:

Representations of Lie Groups (18.757).

Fall 2006:

Representations of Lie Groups (18.758).

Spring 2006:

Differential Equations (18.034).

Older course sites.

Mathematics

The MIT Lie Groups Seminar (Wednesdays 4:30 in 2-142).
Some of my papers, (including slides from an introduction to the orbit method at given at Columbia in December 2007) my vita (as a pdf file, dvi file, or a postscript file).
Jeff Adams is leading an effort to bring the clarity and reliability of hardware documentation to unitary representation theory. The working title of the project is The Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations and you can find a (constantly growing) collection of interesting mathematics there. I am acting as Assistant Project Librarian, and some of my index cards about the project are here.
The Mathematics Genealogy Project. This is a database of mathematics thesis advisors and their students. Find out who your mathematical second cousins are, and whether you would go to Thanksgiving dinner with them.
The AMS electronic journal Representation Theory
Home page of group representer Brian Boe. He has a collection of links to other representation theory people, and to some of their papers on the arXiv.
Johan de Jong has instituted a system for numerically evaluating mathematicians. I am happy to participate in this noble endeavor.
My file of references. These are the papers that have appeared in bibliographies of papers I've written since I started using a computer. They are more or less in AMSTeX format, but most of them were translated from plain TeX, and the process was imperfect at best. You can look at a dvi file as well, and Jeff Adams has made an html file. Along these lines, you can visit Paul Garrett's references, which are for automorphic forms, L-functions, and representation theory.
There is a wonderful site at the University of St. Andrews for mathematical history, including biographies of more than a thousand mathematicians.
Here is a list of errata for Lectures on the Orbit Method,, by A.A. Kirillov (Graduate Studies in Mathematics, Volume 64, American Mathematical Society, 2004), available as a dvi file, a postscript file, or a pdf file. This is the version of November 18, 2005; I will make updates if people are kind enough to send corrections. There is also a draft of a review of the book.

Characters of E₈

Here are the slides for the lecture "The character table of E₈." There was an article published in the AMS Notices of October 2007, describing the mathematical problem and its history more completely. The historical aspects of this article (contained in a sentence or two on page 1128) were inaccurate. You can find here a revision that tries harder.

You can also look at the AIM web site on the subject for a non-technical introduction. A detailed discussion of the software difficulties attached to the size of the calculation is in Marc van Leeuwen's lecture. The best picture is a two-dimensional projection of the root system of E₈, made by John Stembridge from a drawing by Peter McMullen.

There is a web page for mathematicians who don't want to learn about this subject, written by ~~Fearless~~ Project Leader Jeff Adams. If you do want to learn about the subject, visit the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations.

Richard Duffy has kindly (to me; YMMV) provided an mp3 audio (7M) or a wav file (42M) for the E8 lecture. Someday we'll apply some serious computational power and delete the "ums."

A list of my current PhD students

Jerin Gu (jerin at math.mit.edu)
Ben Harris (blharris at math.mit.edu)
Miki Havlickova (mikihavl at math.mit.edu)
Tonghoon Suk (tonghoon at math.mit.edu)

I was a student of Bertram Kostant, finishing in 1976.

A list of my graduated students (there's no such category as "former" student)

PhD: 2007

Chuying Fang (cyfang at mit.edu)

PhD: 2005

Christopher Malon (malon at mit.edu)

MS: 2005

Karen Bernhardt
Nicholas McCarthy

PhD: 2004

Alessandra Pantano (pantano at math.cornell.edu)
Wai Ling Yee (wlyee at math.uwindsor.ca)

PhD: 2001

Pramod Achar (pramod at math.lsu.edu)
Thom Pietraho (thom at pietraho.com)

PhD: 2000

Wentang Kuo (wtkuo at math.uwaterloo.ca)
Dana Pascovici

MS: 2000

Evelyne Robidoux

PhD: 1999

Adam Lucas (alucas at clausius.ucsf.edu)

PhD: 1998

Hongyu He (hongyu at math.lsu.edu)
Monica Nevins (mnevins at uottawa.ca)
Peter Trapa (ptrapa at math.utah.edu)

PhD: 1996

Diko Mihov (mihov at deshaw.com)

PhD: 1994

Kian Boon Tay

PhD: 1992

Eugenio Garnica (garnica at servidor.unam.mx)
William Graham (wag at math.uga.edu)

PhD: 1989

Jing-Song Huang (mahuang at uxmail.ust.hk)
Iwan Pranata (I_Praton at ACAD.FANDM.EDU)

PhD: 1988

Hisayosi Matumoto (hisayosi at ms.u-tokyo.ac.jp)

PhD: 1987

Jesper Bang-Jensen
William McGovern (mcgovern at math.washington.edu)
James Schwartz

PhD: 1986

Susana Salamanca (ssalaman at NMSU.Edu)

PhD: 1983

Luis Casian (casian at math.ohio-state.edu)
Joseph Johnson (jjohns10 at nd.edu)

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