Virginia Tech Gail Rebecca Letzter (September 12, 1960 – September 19, 2024)[1] was an American mathematician specializing in the representation theory of quantum groups, and formerly technical director of the mathematics research group of the National Security Agency.
Herstein and was later awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship supported by MIT.
[3] She held tenured positions in the mathematics departments at Wayne State University[2] and Virginia Tech.
[12][13][14] Subsequently, Letzter began her own seminal analysis of quantum symmetric pairs from the perspective of Hopf algebras, culminating in a complete classification.
[15] [16] [6] This work has served as the basis for breakthrough research by others on canonical bases [17], categorification, and geometric representation theory.