George Lusztig was born in 1946 in Timisoara, Romania and is currently Abdun-Nur Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He graduated from the University of Bucharest, Romania, in 1968, and received both the MA and PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1971. From 1971 to 1977, he was at the University of Warwick, UK and became a professor in 1974. Since 1978, he has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

He was named Honorary Member of the Mathematics Institute of the Romanian Academy in 2005. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, UK and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.He won 2014 Shaw Prize in the category of Mathematical sciences for his fundamental contributions to algebra, algebraic geometry, and representation theory, and for weaving these subjects together to solve old problems and reveal beautiful new connections.