Daniel Nakano
Professor of Mathematics
- Creative Research Medal, 2007
Daniel Nakano, Professor of Mathematics, is a world-renowned authority and a leading force in the representation theory of algebraic groups. This important branch of mathematics benefits many fields, including chemistry and physics, especially as it developed from attempts to understand symmetry in nature. Nakano’s groundbreaking work on the computation of support varieties for Lie algebras led to three important papers that have brought distinction to the University of Georgia. In the first paper thesupport varieties for Weyl modules were determined for good prime numbers, which proved a conjecture made by J. Jantzen in 1987. In the second paper the validity of the Jantzen Conjecture was used to describe the restricted nullcone for good primes. This work culminated in the third paper in which the secomputations were extended to all prime numbers. Nakano’s research provided vital links between the cohomology theory, representation theory and the structure of nilpotent orbits, greatly advancing this field of inquiry.
