Person: Gromov, Mikhael Leonidovich
Mikhael Gromov is a French-Russian mathematician best-known for his geometry. He won the Abel prize in 2009.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- His parents were Leonid Gromov and Lea Rabinovitz.
- Gromov attended Leningrad University, graduating with a Masters degree in Mathematics in 1965.
- The papers which Gromov published in the late 1960s include the following (all written in Russian): On a geometric hypothesis of Banach (1967); The number of simplexes in subdivisions of finite complexes (1968); Transversal mappings of foliations (1968); Transversal mappings of foliations (1968); Simplexes inscribed on a hypersurface (1968); and Stable mappings of foliations into manifolds (1969).
- Moreover, in one and the same setting, Gromov also proved generalizations of both the Hirsch-Smale immersion theorem and the A Phillips submersion theorems.
- Slowly, Gromov's papers (some in collaboration with Ya M Eliashberg and V A Rokhlin) filtered to the West in the early seventies.
- Gromov had been invited to address the Congress but was not allowed to leave the USSR by the Soviet authorities.
- This is one of the papers referred to in the above quote by Wu, as are Gromov's papers (with V A Rokhlin) Imbeddings and immersions in Riemannian geometry (1970), and (with Ya M Eliashberg) Elimination of singularities of smooth mappings (1971).
- For his outstanding work Gromov was presented with the Award of the Moscow Mathematical Society in 1971.
- In 1974 Gromov left Russia for the United States when he was appointed as Professor of Mathematics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
- In 2005 Gromov received the Janos Bolyai International Mathematical Prize for this 1999 book.
- We have been following the remarkable developments which have come from Gromov's 1979 course in Paris.
- We have explained above that the Soviet authorities did not allow Gromov to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice in 1970 to which he had been invited as a speaker.
- In 1985 Gromov was a plenary speaker at the British Mathematical Colloquium in Cambridge when he lectured on Differential geometry with and without infinitesimal calculus: anatomy of curvature.
- Gromov has received a fantastic collection of major mathematical prizes for his wonderful contributions.
- In 1999 Gromov was awarded the Balzan Prize for Mathematics.
- On the other hand, new techniques developed by Gromov for different purposes led to completely new kinds of problems: one can imagine the great variety of questions arising from the introduction of a natural geometric structure on the set of all (isomorphism classes) of Riemannian manifolds, or from the discovery of many new and remarkable invariants of manifolds (e.g., the K-area, the simplicial volume, the minimal volume, etc.), not to forget important new notions, such as that of hyperbolic groups, which is at the origin of major recent developments in differential geometry.
- To summarise, Gromov has brought about not only solutions to famous and time-old problems, but also the bases of new fields of study for many scholars.
- Due to the large number of his disciples and the wide repercussions aroused by his important discoveries, Mikhael Gromov has had, and will continue to have, a considerable influence on contemporary mathematics.
- Gromov has pioneered entirely new disciplines in a variety of fields, including geometry and analysis, and has had a substantial impact on all the mathematical sciences.
- Mikhail Gromov has led some of the most important developments, producing profoundly original general ideas which have resulted in new perspectives on geometry and other areas of mathematics.
- Gromov's name is forever attached to deep results and important concepts within Riemannian geometry, symplectic geometry, string theory and group theory.
- The Abel committee says: "Mikhail Gromov is always in pursuit of new questions and is constantly thinking of new ideas for solutions to old problems.
- The work of Gromov will continue to be a source of inspiration for many future mathematical discoveries".
Born 23 December 1943, Boksitogorsk, Russia.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Abel, Group Theory, Origin Russia, Topology, Prize Wolf
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
