Addition of Fields Medalist to faculty completes historic recruiting year for Mathematics Department

The University of Chicago Mathematics Department is sending tremors through the mathematics world. The department hired three new, world-renowned faculty members at the beginning of the fall 1998 quarter, and a fourth--1990 Fields Medalist Vladimir Drinfeld--has just arrived from Ukraine.

Barry Mazur, Professor in Mathematics at Harvard University, responded to the news with a jest. “No. Oh no. Oh, that’s terrible,” he said. Turning serious, he added, “It’s a wonderful appointment.”

Mazur said he regards Drinfeld and another of the new Chicago mathematics hires --Alexander “Sasha” Beilinson-- as Russia’s two most influential mathematicians. “There’s no question that Chicago has achieved a great coup there. These are great mathematicians,” Mazur said.

Fields Medals are the equivalent of Nobel Prizes in mathematics, according to Robert Fefferman, Louis Block Professor in Mathematics and Department Chairman. The medals are awarded to no fewer than two and no more than four mathematicians under the age of 40 every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

Yuri Manin, director of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and chairman of the Fields Prize Committee at the 1998 International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin, offered an equally strong assessment of Drinfeld.

“His work deeply influenced world mathematics of the last two decades,” said Manin, who served as Drinfeld’s and Beilinson’s Ph.D. thesis adviser at Moscow University in the 1980s. “Several research monographs, seminar notes and hundreds of papers were dedicated to the two new chapters of mathematics created by him: the so-called Drinfeld modules and quantum groups.”

At 41, Beilinson no longer is eligible for the Fields Medal. Nevertheless, “his mathematical achievements are on the level of those of the most renowned Fields Medalists,” Manin said. The influence of Beilinson’s work extends into representation theory, arithmetical geometry and modern mathematical physics, according to Manin.

Beilinson holds the prestigious first David and Mary Winton Green University Professorship in Mathematics. Since 1989, Beilinson has generally spent his fall semesters teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Professor in Mathematics, working the rest of the year as a researcher at the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka, Russia.

“There are several people here whose research is very close to mine and who inspired it, in a sense, and so I wish to work with them,” Beilinson said. Beilinson also collaborates with Drinfeld, whom he has known for more than two decades.

“People here would like to create something new,” Beilinson said. “It’s very nice to come to a place that hopefully will create something wonderful when everything is moving.”

Nikolai Nadirashvili, Professor in Mathematics, and Ridgway Scott, Professor in Computer Science & Mathematics, complete what David Oxtoby, Dean of the Physical Sciences Division, calls a historic recruiting year for the Mathematics Department. “I’m not sure that any Mathematics Department in the last quarter century has had the recruiting year that ours has had,” Oxtoby said.

Nadirashvili comes to Chicago from Moscow’s Institute for Information Transmissions Problems, where two Fields medalists maintain affiliations. But Nadirashvili has spent much of the 1990s visiting Europe’s mathematical research institutes.

Said Fefferman, “Nadirashvili is an outstanding mathematical analyst, one of the greatest experts in the world on elliptic partial differential equations, both linear and non-linear. He has come up with some absolutely extraordinary counterexamples to show that the things all of us thought were true are not true. This is very fundamental work, indeed.”

Nadirashvili said joining the Chicago faculty enables him to work with several mathematics professors whom he regards as the top scholars in his field of analysis.

Ridgway Scott, a member of the Chicago faculty from 1973 to 1975, returns to continue his academic career as a mathematician at the University. Now he is a computer scientist as well as an outstanding applied mathematician, said Todd Dupont, Professor in Computer Science & Mathematics.

“He has developed into a leader in biological computing,” Dupont said.

Before returning to Chicago this year, Scott directed the Texas Center for Advanced Molecular Computation and he held the M.D. Anderson Chair in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Houston.

Scott and Dupont are among the two dozen Chicago scientists studying the physics of exploding stars at the University’s new Center on Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes.

“It’s difficult to get this very broad collection of scientists to think about a single problem in a productive way,” Dupont said. “Scott’s playing an important role in that because he’s an expert in several areas that are essential to this project.”