Martin Isaacs


I. Martin "Marty" Isaacs is a group theorist and representation theorist and professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He currently lives in Berkeley, California and is an occasional participant on MathOverflow.

Academic biography

Isaacs completed his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1964 under Richard Brauer. From at least 1979 until 2011, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In May 2011, he retired and became a professor emeritus. The Mathematics Genealogy Project lists him as having had 28 doctoral students.

Research

Isaacs is most famous for formulating the Isaacs–Navarro conjecture along with Gabriel Navarro, a widely cited generalization of the McKay conjecture.

Books

Isaacs is famous as the author of Character Theory of Finite Groups, one of the most well-known graduate student-level introductory books in character theory and representation theory of finite groups.
Isaacs is also the author of the book Algebra: A Graduate Course, which received highly positive reviews. Additionally, he is the author of Finite Group Theory.

Honors

Isaacs is a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He retired in 2011.
In 2009, a conference was held at the Universitat de Valencia in Spain to honor his contributions.
Isaacs is also a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Isaacs was a Pólya lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America. He received the Benjamin Smith Reynolds award for teaching engineering students at the University of Wisconsin and a UW Madison campus teaching award. He was also the recipient of a Sloan Foundation research award.