Abstract

Robert Boltje (born February 14, 1960) is a mathematician whose research interests include finite groups, their representations, and applications to number theory. He studied in Munich where he received his diploma in 1985. He then moved to Augsburg where he obtained his doctorate under the direction of Jürgen Ritter. The title of his Ph. D. thesis was "Canonical and explicit Brauer induction in the character ring of a finite group and a generalization for Mackey functors". He completed his habilitation in Augsburg in 1995, with a thesis on "Mackey functors in representation theory and number theory". He was a postdoctoral fellow from 1990 to 1992 and a Heisenberg fellow from 1997 to 1998, supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 1999 he moved to the University of California at Santa Cruz where he is now a full professor. Robert Boltje became known first through his fundamental work on induction theorems in representation theory. This circle of ideas was partially motivated by questions in number theory and continued research of Artin and Brauer. Robert Boltje then realized that his methods carry over to Mackey and biset functors on finite groups. Thus many of his papers are now concerned with these functorial methods in representation theory which also have applications in number theory. More recently, he has worked on open conjectures in representation theory, formulated by Alperin, Broué, Dade and others. These conjectures link blocks of representations of finite groups to blocks of representations of local subgroups. With his coauthors, he introduced p-permutation equivalences between blocks and studied their properties. This also led him to investigate Picard groups of blocks, in joint work with Kessar and Linckelmann. Robert Boltje was awarded a number of prizes, both for his research and his teaching. In Santa Cruz, he led several students to their Ph. D. His coauthors include mathematicians from Germany, Mexico, Turkey and the UK.