◀ ▲ ▶History / 20th-century / Person: Drinfeld, Vladimir Gershonovich
Person: Drinfeld, Vladimir Gershonovich
Vladimir Drinfeld is a Ukranian-born American mathematician best known for his work in algebraic geometry over finite fields.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Gershon Ikhelevich Drinfeld (29 February 1908-18 August 2000) was educated at Kiev University and was head of the Mathematics Department at Kharkov University from 1944 to 1962.
- Gershon Drinfeld also played a major role in the Kharkov Mathematical Society.
- Drinfeld completed his postgraduate studies in 1977 and he defended his "candidate" thesis in 1978 at Moscow University.
- The "candidate" thesis is the Russian equivalent of the British or American Ph.D. However, despite being extraordinarily talented, it was difficult for Drinfeld to obtain a position in Moscow.
- Since the address which appeared in Drinfeld's passport was not Moscow, he could not get a job there.
- Drinfeld gave an important lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley in 1986.
- Entitled Quantum groups, the talk reviewed the results obtained by Drinfeld and M Jimbo on Hopf algebras (quantum groups).
- In 1988 Drinfeld defended his "doctor" thesis at Steklov Institute, Moscow.
- Drinfeld defies any easy classification ...
- Drinfeld's main achievements are his proof of the Langlands conjecture for GL(2)GL(2)GL(2) over a functional field; and his work in quantum group theory.
- Although he only proved a special case of the Langlands conjecture, Drinfeld has introduced important new ideas in his solution and made a real breakthrough.
- Drinfeld and Manin worked on the construction of instantons using ideas from algebraic geometry.
- Drinfeld's work on Langlands conjectures, quantum groups, p-adic uniformizations etc.
- In 1992 Drinfeld was elected a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
- Alexander A Beilinson, also a student of Manin's, was appointed to the University of Chicago in 1998, just a short time before Drinfeld.
- Beilinson and Drinfeld had known each other for many years and had already collaborated on two papers before becoming colleagues in Chicago: Affine Kac-Moody algebras and polydifferentials (1994) and Quantization of Hitchin's fibration and Langlands' program (1996).
- One of Drinfeld's most recent articles is Infinite-dimensional vector bundles in algebraic geometry: an introduction.
- Drinfeld was named Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago on 1 March 2001.
Born 14 February 1954, Kharkov, Ukraine.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Fields Medal, Group Theory, Origin Ukraine
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
-
- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
