by Alejandro Adem, Tom Halverson, Arun Ram, and Efim Zelmanov
Georgia Benkart passed away unexpectedly in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 29, 2022. Georgia earned her BA from Ohio State University and her PhD in 1974 from Yale University under Nathan Jacobson. She was a profoundly influential scholar and leader in the fields of Lie theory, representation theory, combinatorics, and noncommutative algebra. She spent her career at UW-Madison, where she was the second woman to join the department and the second to earn tenure. At the time of Georgia’s retirement in 2006, she was the E. B. Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics. Georgia is survived by her sister, Paula Benkart, who also attended Ohio State University and earned a PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University in 1975.
Georgia was an inspiring teacher, the advisor to 22 PhD students, and a mentor to scores of mathematicians around the world. She published more than 130 articles and research monographs and gave more than 350 invited talks, including plenary lectures at AMS meetings, the AWM Noether Lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, and the Emmy Noether Lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians. Her lectures were works of art. Without fail they were accessible to nonexperts, told a compelling and creative story, delighted her audiences with literary allusions and puns, and invited everyone into the fun.
Georgia’s service to the mathematical profession is legendary. After retiring from teaching in 2006, she continued an active research program in which she published nearly 40 papers. At the same time, she focused her attention on service to her professional societies. She was president of the Association for Women in Mathematics and an associate secretary for the American Mathematical Society. In fact, she was the lead organizer of the 2020, 2021 and 2022 Joint Math Meetings, the last of which took place online just three weeks before her death.
However, Georgia’s most meaningful and enduring impact on our community lies outside of what is found in her impressive CV. It is about the people whose lives she changed. She was a pioneer in building research collaborations, starting when she worked with teams of graduate students and continuing with the many research networks that she built among early-career women mathematicians.
A recent article in March 2022 Notices, “Gems from the Work of Georgia Benkart,” profiles her mathematical work. We are enormously pleased that she was able to see this before her death. In this memoriam, we have asked several of her colleagues and collaborators to describe their experiences working with her. In our opinion, this is the best way to know our friend, Georgia Benkart.
To read the full article, click on the link to the PDF at the top right corner of this page.
