Ezra Getzler

About

Ezra Getzler received his PhD from Harvard University in 1986. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and then a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of Northwestern University in 1997. Getzler works in mathematical physics, with a focus on the relations between quantum field theory, topology, and geometry. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 1991 and has held several distinguished visiting appointments, including visiting professorships at the Research Institute of Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University, the University of Geneva, the Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at Imperial College, the Microsoft Visiting Research Fellowship at the Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge, and membership of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2013, Getzler was named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He received a Simons Fellowship in 2017.

Research topics

• Mathematics
• Pure mathematics
• Mathematical physics
• Combinatorics

Selected publications

• Lie theory for nilpotent L_∞-algebras

  Annals of Mathematics · 2009-07-12 · 290 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Deligne groupoid is a functor from nilpotent differential graded Lie algebras concentrated in positive degrees to groupoids; in the special case of Lie algebras over a field of characteristic zero, it gives the associated simply connected Lie group. We generalize the Deligne groupoid to a functor from L 1 -algebras concentrated in degree > n to n-groupoids. (We actually construct the nerve of the n-groupoid, which is an enriched Kan complex.) The construction of gamma is quite explicit (it i…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Transferring homotopy commutative algebraic structures

  Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra · 2008-06-03 · 50 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Higher derived brackets

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2010-10-28 · 25 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We show that there is a sequence of operations on the positively graded part of a differential graded algebra making it into an L-infinity algebra. The formulas for the higher brackets involve Bernoulli numbers. The construction generalizes the derived bracket for Poisson manifolds, and the Lie 2-algebra associated to a Courant algebroid constructed by Roytenberg and Weinstein.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Operads Revisited

  Progress in mathematics · 2009-01-01 · 25 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Operads may be represented as symmetric monoidal functors on a small symmetric monoidal category. We discuss the axioms which must be imposed on a symmetric monoidal functor in order that it give rise to a theory similar to the theory of operads: we call such functors patterns. We also develop the enriched version of the theory, and show how it may be applied to axiomatize topological field theory.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Equivariant Toda Lattice

  Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences · 2004-06-30 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Toda lattice is an infinite dimensional dynamical system of commuting flows (∂, δn, ¯ δn | n> 0), acting on functions (q, ak, āk | k> 0) defined on a one-dimensional lattice. In the limit of small lattice spacing ε, which is all that will concern us here (Takasaki and Takebe [10]), the functions (q, ak, āk) become functions of a real parameter x, and the role of translation by one unit of the lattice is taken by the operator E = e ε ∂ , where ∂ is the infinitesimal generator of…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Topological Field Theory and Integrable Systems

  NSF · $108k · 2005–2008

• Geometry and Physics EMSW21-RTG

  NSF · $1.3M · 2007–2013

Frequent coauthors

• John D. S. Jones

  University of Warwick

  18 shared

• Michèle Vergne

  Université Paris Cité

  13 shared

• Nicole Berline

  13 shared

• Scott Petrack

  University of Warwick

  12 shared

• Tohru Eguchi

  Durham University

  9 shared

• Mikhail Kapranov

  5 shared

• Jonathan Block

  Technische Universität Braunschweig

  5 shared

• Rahul Pandharipande

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Mathematics

  Princeton University

  1986

• B.A., Mathematics

  Harvard University

  1981

Awards & honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1991)
• Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2013)
• Simons Fellowship (2017)

Similar researchers at Northwestern University

• David Leeh-62
• Alexander Smithh-32
• Ben Weinkoveh-28