1998 CRM-Fields Prize awarded to Robert Moody

Robert V. Moody received his Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Toronto. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1980 and was awarded the 1994-95 Eugene Wigner Medal (jointly with V. Kac) for “work on affine Lie algebras that has influenced many areas of theoretical physics”. He was twice honoured by the Canadian Mathematical Society, first in 1978 when he was invited to present the inaugural Coxeter-James Lecture, given to the most outstanding young Canadian mathematician within ten years of their degree, and in 1995 when he was selected for the Jeffery-Williams Prize Lecture for the 50th Anniversary of the Canadian Mathematical Society. His discovery, independently from and simultaneously with V.G. Kac, of an enormous new class of infinite dimensional Lie Algebras, which are now called Kac-Moody algebras, is considered as one of the seminal events in the history of mathematics in the last half of the twentieth century. In recent years, with various collaborators Dr. Moody has been studying the mathematical aspects of long-range aperiodic order, especially the quickly emerging area of quasi-crystals.

Professor Moody gave a lecture at the CRM, September 25, 1998.