Professor Van den Ban appointed as Research Professor of Lie Theory
Professor Erik van den Ban has been appointed as Research Professor of Lie Theory at the Faculty of Science with retroactive effect as of 1 May 2013. ‘I found out that this area is constantly developing, often with surprisingly effective applications. From then on, I knew I wanted to become a mathematician and I started reading every book available about the subject.‘
Van den Ban started his Mathematics degree programme at Utrecht University in 1974 and obtained his doctorate degree in 1982, under the supervision of Professor Hans Duistermaat, who met an untimely death in 2010. Together with Duistermaat, Van den Ban worked at partial differential equations, and after a while became acquainted with Lie theory, named after Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie.
‘The Lie groups turned out to be the perfect tool for understanding symmetries in geometry, harmonic analysis and number theory. They also play an important role in theoretical physics in the description of elementary particles in quantum mechanics, and in the description of the fundamental forces of nature.’
Sophus Lie
‘Lie theory has developed into a pivotal field of expertise of mathematics in the twentieth century,’ explains Van den Ban. ‘At the end of the nineteenth century, Sophus Lie tried to solve systems of partial differential equations by making use of the underlying symmetries. These symmetries form a group, which is a concept previously developed by French mathematician Galois to understand solutions of algebraic equations.’‘The Lie groups turned out to be the perfect tool for understanding symmetries in geometry, harmonic analysis and number theory. They also play an important role in theoretical physics in the description of elementary particles in quantum mechanics, and in the description of the fundamental forces of nature.’