Shlomo Sternberg

This last work was also the inspiration for a result in equivariant symplectic geometry that disclosed for the first time a surprising and unexpected connection between the theory of Hamiltonian torus actions on compact symplectic manifolds and the theory of convex polytopes. This theorem, the "AGS convexity theorem," was simultaneously proved by Guillemin-Sternberg and Michael Atiyah in the early 1980s.

Among other honors, Sternberg was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1974 and a honorary doctorate by the University of Mannheim in 1991. He delivered the AMS Colloquium Lecture [de; fr; pt] in 1990 and the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Memorial Lecture in 2006.

Sternberg was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969, of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986, of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences In 1999, and of the American Philosophical Society in 2010.

In the 1960s Sternberg became involved with Isadore Singer in the project of revisiting Élie Cartan's papers from the early 1900s on the classification of the simple transitive infinite Lie pseudogroups, and of relating Cartan's results to recent results in the theory of G-structures and supplying rigorous (by present-day standards) proofs of his main theorems. Also, together with Victor Guillemin and Daniel Quillen, he extended this classification to a larger class of pseudogroups: the primitive infinite pseudogroups. As a by-product, they also obtained the " integrability of characteristics" theorem for over-determined systems of partial differential equations.

After postdoctoral work at New York University (1956–1957) and an instructorship at University of Chicago (1957–1959), Sternberg joined the Mathematics Department at Harvard University in 1959, where he was George Putnam Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics until 2017. Since 2017, he is Emeritus Professor at the Harvard Mathematics Department.

Sternberg earned his PhD in 1955 from Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis entitled "Some Problems in Discrete Nonlinear Transformations in One and Two Dimensions", supervised by Aurel Wintner.

Shlomo Zvi Sternberg (born 1936), is an American mathematician known for his work in geometry, particularly symplectic geometry and Lie theory.