Person: Okounkov, Andrei Yuryevich

Andrei Yuryevich Okounkov won a Fields Medal in 2006 for his contributions bridging probability, representation theory and algebraic geometry.

After the award of his first degree, Okounkov remained at Moscow State University undertaking research for his Candidate's degree (equivalent to a Ph.D.) supervised by Alexander Aleksandrovich Kirillov.
Okounkov was awarded his Candidate's degree in 1995 for his thesis Admissible Representation of Gelfand Pairs Associated with the Infinite Symmetric Group.
In 2002 Okounkov was appointed as a Professor at Princeton University.
Okounkov gave the first proof of the celebrated Baik-Deift-Johansson conjecture, which states that the asymptotics of random partitions distributed according to the Plancherel measure coincides with that of the eigenvalues of large Hermitian matrices.
An important and influential result of Okounkov is a formula he found in joint work with Borodin, which expresses a general Toeplitz determinant as the Fredholm determinant of the product of two associated Hankel operators.
The new techniques of working with random partitions invented and successfully developed by Okounkov lead to a striking array of applications in a wide variety of fields: topology of module spaces, ergodic theory, the theory of random surfaces and algebraic geometry.
Okounkov left Princeton in 2010 to take up a professorship of mathematics at Columbia University in New York.

Born 26 July 1969, Moscow, Russia.

View full biography at MacTutor

Prize Fields Medal, Origin Russia

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O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive