Marc Rieffel

Marc Aristide Rieffel is an American mathematician noted for his fundamental contributions to C*-algebra and quantum group theory. He is currently a professor in the department of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2012, he was selected as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

Contributions Rieffel earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 1963 under Richard Kadison with a dissertation entitled A Characterization of Commutative Group Algebras and Measure Algebras.

Rieffel introduced Morita equivalence as a fundamental notion in noncommutative geometry and as a tool for classifying C*-algebras. More recently, Rieffel has introduced a noncommutative analogue of Gromov-Hausdorff convergence for compact metric spaces which is motivated by applications to string theory.