Marc Rieffel Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

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

Rieffel introduced Morita equivalence as a fundamental notion in noncommutative geometry and as a tool for classifying C*-algebras. For example, in 1981 he showed that if Aθ denotes the noncommutative torus of angle θ, then Aθ and Aη are Morita equivalent if and only if θ and η lie in the same orbit of the action of SL(2, Z) on R by fractional linear transformations. More recently, Rieffel has introduced a noncommutative analogue of Gromov-Hausdorff convergence for compact metric spaces which is motivated by applications to string theory.

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.