The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 165

CHAPTER 27
A Program in C*-Algebras
Escapes
George Elliott
“Among the thousand or so people who passed through [Fields]
during that time ... there were two longer-term participants,
Eberhard Kirchberg and Chris Phillips, who made an enormous
impact on the C*-algebra classification theory that I had proposed
a few years before.”
I still haven’t recovered from the two-year Fields program on
C*-Algebras 1 that ended twenty years ago.
We got additional funding from NSERC and the
Connaught Fund that financed a second year, which Fields
was happy to run at the same time as the homotopy theory
program, to which operator algebras is, after all, fairly close.
Among the thousand or so people who passed through
during that time (1994-96), there were two longer-term
1
C*-algebras arose from the mathematics needed for quantum
mechanics and from there have been generalized.