 
Grigoriy A. Margulis |
L. DeForest Professor of Mathematics
Grigoriy A. Margulis, the newly appointed Erastus L. DeForest Professor of Mathematics, is renowned for his work in Lie group theory, ergodic theory, number theory, geometry and combinatorics.
A native of Moscow, he was awarded the prestigious Fields Medal -- the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize -- in 1978 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki, Finland, but was not permitted by the Soviet government to travel to Finland to accept this award. The medal is given to mathematicians under the age of 40 for their contributions to the field as well as for their promise of future achievement. Margulis was selected for his work solving various problems in the theory of discrete subgroups of Lie groups, most notably for the proof of the arithmeticity of higher-rank lattices.
More recently, Margulis has focused his research on flows on homogeneous spaces and number theory, where in particular he has proven the Oppenheim conjecture. His other areas of interest are dynamical systems and combinatorics (random graphs and explicit construction of expanders). In these and other areas, he has been credited with inventing important new mathematical techniques and for solving mathematical problems that have long perplexed other scholars in the field.
Margulis has been honored with Germany's prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Prize for U.S. scientists and scholars and the Russian Academy of Sciences' Lobachevsky Prize. He received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Bielefeld in Germany in 1999.
Margulis is the author of the 1991 book "Discrete Subgroups of Semisimple Lie Groups" and of over 75 mathematical papers.
The mathematician earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Moscow University. He was a research fellow at the Institute for Problems in Information Transmission in Moscow from 1970 until he immigrated to the United States in 1991, the same year he joined the Yale faculty. He was a visiting professor at the College de France, Harvard University and Columbia University, and also held appointments at the University of Bonn, the Max-Planck Institute in Bonn and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
At Yale, Margulis is currently teaching the undergraduate course "Vector Calculus and Linear Algebra" as well as advanced graduate-level courses.
A foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Margulis is also an honorary fellow of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society.
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