In 1977, math professor Victor Kac was a refugee from the Soviet Union living in Rome. As he was awaiting a U.S. visa so he could begin teaching at MIT, he met Claudio Procesi, an algebra professor at the Sapienza University of Rome, and other Italian mathematicians who set him up with a room in a family member’s home and helped him with paid talks in Pisa and with traveling throughout Italy. He said that those professors became his lifelong friends.
More than 40 years later, he will return to Rome in November to be inducted as a foreign member of the Accademia Nationale dei Lincei, the Italian National Academy of Sciences, which is the oldest science academy in the world.
“I was quite surprised and profoundly honored,” says Kac, who joins only 20 other Accademia foreign members in math, such as Fields medalists Pierre Deligne, Pierre-Louis Lions, David Mumford, and Shing-Tung Yau.
Kac works in several areas of algebra and mathematical physics related to symmetries....
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