Person: Bratteli, Ola
Ola Bratteli was a Norwegian mathematician who worked on operator algebras and quantum statistical mechanics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Trygve Bratteli was a construction worker and carpenter who became an active resistance worker during the Second World War and was arrested by the Germans in 1942.
- Ola Bratteli joined the Framfylkingen when he was young.
- This quotation is from a version of the talk Størmer gave at a memorial meeting for Ola Bratteli in 2015.
- "Oh, Ola, we've made a big mistake," he said.
- After the award of his cand.real degree, Bratteli went to the United States to undertake research for his Ph.D. He was advised to take this route by Størmer who had himself gone to New York for his Ph.D. One of Størmer's fellow Ph.D. students in New York had been James Gilbert Glimm (born 24 March 1934) who also had Richard Kadison as his thesis advisor.
- Glimm had worked on operator algebras and in fact Bratteli's cand.real dissertation was essentially a generalisation of this work of Glimm.
- Størmer had advised Bratteli to study for his doctorate with Glimm in New York.
- Bratteli was awarded a doctorate from the University of Oslo in 1974 for his thesis Inductive limits of finite dimensional C*-algebras.
- A few years later, this group settled on the campus Joseph-Aiguier, and it was there when Bratteli joined them after the award of his doctorate.
- It was at the Centre de Physique Théorique that Bratteli met Derek W Robinson, a British mathematician, and they became close friends and collaborators.
- Bratteli attended the "Conference on C-algebras and their Applications in Theoretical Physics" held in Rome from 13-18 October 1975 and published the paper Self-adjointness of unbounded derivations on C-algebras in the Proceedings of the onference.
- As well as undertaking research at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, Bratteli also spent time at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung of Bielefeld University in Germany.
- Bratteli continued to collaborate with Robinson and made several trips to Australia.
- In 1980 Bratteli became a professor at the Norwegian University of Technology in Trondheim.
- The last single author paper Bratteli wrote was a conference paper published in 1988, and he had around 50 multi-author works in the following 20 years.
- Bratteli wrote several further books.
- For example, he received: (i) The Professor Ingerid Dal and Sister Ulrikke Greve Dal's scholarship in support of humanistic research in 2001; (ii) The Nansen Foundation's prize for outstanding research from The Norwegian Academy of Sciences in 2004; and (iii) The Research Council of Norway's prize, the Möbius Prize, for outstanding research in 2004.
Born 24 October 1946, Oslo, Norway. Died 8 February 2015, Oslo, Norway.
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Origin Norway
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- @J-J-O'Connor
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
