Person: Ornstein, Donald Samuel

Don Ornstein is an American mathematician working in the area of ergodic theory.

His parents were Harry Ornstein and Rose Wisner.
However, by the time he was awarded his doctorate, Ornstein was already at Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton where he spent two academic years 1956-58.
Ornstein's first publication appeared in 1959 in the Annals of Mathematics.
However, his second paper, written jointly with R V Chacon, was on ergodic theory, the topic for which Ornstein is now best known.
In 1960 Ornstein was appointed as an Assistant professor at Stanford University.
The year 1968 was an important one for Ornstein for in that year he began proving a number of exceptionally important results which led to major advances in ergodic theory in the following years.
The simplest case of the Ornstein isomorphism theorem (1970), states that two Bernoulli shifts of the same entropy are isomorphic.
Ornstein published other significant papers in 1970 in addition to Bernoulli shifts with the same entropy are isomorphic for which he received the Bôcher Memorial Prize, although it is clear that it was this paper which was the starting point for all that followed.
After the publication of this outstanding work, Ornstein was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1975-76 and at the University of California's Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley in 1983-84.
Perhaps the greatest honours that Ornstein has received was his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.

Born 30 July 1934, New York, USA.

View full biography at MacTutor

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