Person: Ratner, Marina
Marina Ratner was a Russian mathematician who worked in Israel and America. She worked in ergodic theory.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Marina grew up in Moscow where she attended school.
- After leaving school, Ratner applied to study at Moscow State University.
- Ratner graduated in 1961 having studied mathematics and physics as her main subjects.
- After graduating, Ratner worked for four years in Kolmogorov's applied statistics group and in his special school for gifted high school students.
- Of course Kolmogorov was an important influence on her during these years but a perhaps even greater influence was Yakov Grigorevich Sinai who was only three years older than Ratner and had been one of Kolmogorov's most outstanding students.
- In 1969, after submitting her thesis Geodesic Flows on Unit Tangent Bundles of Compact Surfaces of Negative Curvature, Ratner graduated with a degree equivalent to a Ph.D. In this thesis she studied the ergodic theory of geodesic flows on negatively curved surfaces, dynamical systems with very random behaviour which arise geometrically.
- After applying for a visa to emigrate to Israel, Ratner was dismissed from her position at the Engineering School in 1970.
- At Berkeley, Ratner was promoted steadily until she reached the rank of full professor in 1982.
- Marina's much acclaimed work of the last few years - the Raghunathan conjecture - are a far-reaching generalisation and application of these ideas to an important situation.
- Marina saw that her methods were appropriate ones for this type of question, and eventually she gave a complete proof of the Raghunathan conjecture.
- Ratner was an invited plenary speaker at the congress.
- Ratner's lecture was entitled Interactions between ergodic theory, Lie groups and number theory.
- We have used quotations from awards that were given to Ratner to illustrate the importance of her mathematical contributions.
Born 30 October 1938, Moscow, Russia. Died 7 July 2017, El Cerrito, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Russia, Women
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- 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
