◀ ▲ ▶History / 20th-century / Person: Margulis, Gregori Aleksandrovic
Person: Margulis, Gregori Aleksandrovic
Grigori Margulis is a Russian-born American mathematician known for his work on lattices in Lie groups.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Margulis remained at Moscow University for his postgraduate studies.
- Margulis completed his graduate studies in 1970 and he was awarded the degree of Candidate of Science for a thesis On some problems in the theory of U-systems.
- After being awarded the Candidate of Science degree (the equivalent of a British or American Ph.D.), Margulis began to work in the Institute for Problems in Information Transmission.
- International honour was given to Margulis in 1978 when he was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress at Helsinki.
- However it was not a happy occasion for Margulis who was not permitted by the Soviet authorities to travel to Helsinki to receive the Medal.
- He delivered the address in the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki where Margulis should have received the Medal and where the Helsinki Accords had been signed on 1 August 1975.
- Margulis's most spectacular achievement has been the complete solution of that problem and, in particular, the proof of the conjecture in question.
- Margulis was soon able to leave the Soviet bloc and, in 1979, he was able to spend three months at the University of Bonn.
- Between 1988 and 1991 Margulis made a number of visits to the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, to the Institut des Hautes Études and to the Collège de France, to Harvard and to the Institute for Advanced study in Princeton.
- Margulis has received many honours for his work.
- Margulis has also been awarded the Lobachevsky International Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences and has been elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences.
- This was achieved by a remarkable tour de force, in which probabilistic ideas revolving around a noncommutative version of the ergodic theorem were combined with p-adic analysis and with algebraic geometric ideas showing that "rigidity" phenomena, earlier established by Margulis and others, could be formulated in such a way ("super-rigidity") as to imply arithmeticity.
- A third dramatic breakthrough came when Margulis showed that Kazhdan's "Property T" (known to hold for rigid lattices) could be used in a single arithmetic lattice construction to solve two apparently unrelated problems.
- Margulis's work is characterized by extraordinary depth, technical power, creative synthesis of ideas and methods from different areas of mathematics, and a grand architectural unity of its final form.
- In 2008 the Pure and Applied Mathematics Quarterly produced a Special Issue in honour of Margulis.
Born 24 February 1946, Moscow, Russia.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Abel, Prize Fields Medal, Origin Russia, Prize Wolf
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
