Web page for David Vogan

My office is Room 2-355, at MIT.
Telephone: 617-253-4991
E-mail: dav at math.mit.edu

My office telephone is forwarded to me. I very rarely go to the office. Best way to reach me is email; I am happy to arrange Zoom meetings, or Google Hangouts, or Skype. Mailing to the office address is usually a bad idea; I will probably not receive such things for months after they arrive.

Even in these desperate times, I have not joined Facebook.

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

With ever-growing admiration and constant affection, here are 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.

Mathematics

Characters of E8

Here are the slides for a version of the lecture "The character table of E8," in the version delivered at WPI on September 15, 2011. 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 file for the E8 lecture. Michael Breen edited out some of the "ums," but didn't completely succeed in making me sound like Laurence Olivier.

For an extremely nontechnical account, go to Amazon's web page for the thriller The Wheel of Darkness, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. Click on "look inside," and search for "E8".

A list of my current PhD students

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

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

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