Kac studied mathematics at
Moscow State University, receiving his MS in 1965 and his PhD in 1968. From 1968 to 1976, he held a teaching position at the
Moscow Institute of Electronic Machine Building (MIEM). He left the
Soviet Union in 1977, becoming an associate professor of mathematics at MIT. In 1981, he was promoted to full professor. Kac received a
Sloan Fellowship and the Medal of the
Collège de France, both in 1981, and a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. He received the
Wigner Medal (1996) "in recognition of work on affine
Lie algebras that has had wide influence in
theoretical physics". In 1978 he was an invited speaker (
Highest weight representations of infinite dimensional Lie algebras) at the
International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in
Helsinki. Kac was a plenary speaker at the 1988
American Mathematical Society centennial conference. In 2002 he gave a plenary lecture,
Classification of Supersymmetries, at the ICM in Beijing. Kac is a Fellow of the
American Mathematical Society, an honorary member of the
Moscow Mathematical Society, Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the
National Academy of Sciences. The research of Victor Kac primarily concerns
representation theory and
mathematical physics. His work appears in mathematics and physics and in the development of
quantum field theory,
string theory and the theory of
integrable systems. Kac has published 13 books and over 200 articles in mathematics and physics journals and is listed as an
ISI highly cited researcher. Victor Kac was awarded the 2015 AMS
Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He was married with
Michèle Vergne and they have a daughter, Marianne Kac-Vergne, who is a professor of American civilization at the university of Picardie. His brother
Boris Katz is a principal research scientist at MIT. ==Kac–Moody algebra==