Friederich Ignaz Mautner


Friederich Ignaz Mautner was an Austrian-American mathematician, known for his research on the representation theory of groups, functional analysis, and differential geometry.
Mautner, a Jew, emigrated from Austria after the Anschluss via the U.K. and Ireland to the U.S.A. He received in 1948 a Ph.D. from Princeton University with thesis Unitary Representations of Infinite Groups. He taught at Johns Hopkins University and then at the University of Paris and in Italy.
Mautner was an assistant at the Queen's University Belfast and a scholar at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1944–1946. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1946/47, 1954/56, and 1965/66. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in the academic year 1954/55.
He is known for Mautner's Lemma and Mautner's Phenomenon in the representation theory of Lie groups. Mautner's work on the lemma and the phenomenon was done in connection with the ergodic theory of geodesic flows. With a ground-breaking paper in 1958, Mautner became an important pioneer in the representation theory of reducible p-adic groups. The Mautner Group, a special five-dimensional Lie group, is named after him.
His doctoral students include Joseph Shalika.

Selected works