Person: Kontsevich, Maxim Lvovich
Maxim Kontsevich is a Russian and French mathematician best known for his work on geometric aspects of mathematical physics including knot theory, quantisation, and mirror symmetry.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- He devised the Kontsevich system for the Cyrillization of the Korean language, the main system in use today for producing Russian versions of Korean texts.
- Kontsevich attended secondary school in Moscow and became fascinated by mathematics and physics at an early age.
- In 1983, when he was only nineteen years old, Kontsevich's paper The growth of the Lie algebra generated by two generic vector fields on the line (Russian), written jointly with A A Kirillov, was published.
- Perhaps in retrospect one can say that the most significant event for Kontsevich was an invitation to spend three months at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn in 1990.
- many of the steps in this proof exhibit Kontsevich's unique talent for combinatorial calculations.
- This remarkable achievement led to Kontsevich receiving invitations to Harvard University, Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, and the University of Bonn.
- Kontsevich could have settled permanently in the United States.
- Kontsevich quickly followed his brilliant paper of 1992 with another in the following year entitled Vassiliev's knot invariants.
- At the First European Congress of Mathematics in Paris in 1992 Kontsevich gave the invited address Feynman diagrams and low dimensional topology which was published in 1994 in the Proceeding of the conference.
- Kontsevich was a Plenary Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1994 in Zürich.
- This was one of the four major problems which Kontsevich worked on, leading to him receiving a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998.
- In addition to the honours mentioned above, Kontsevich was awarded the Daniel Iagolnitzer Prize and elected a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris.
Born 25 August 1964, Khimki, near Moscow, Russia.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Fields Medal, Origin Russia, Prize Shaw
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
