Maxim Kontsevich

Maxim Kontsevich
Born	(1964-08-25) 25 August 1964 Khimki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Residence	Miami, United States
Citizenship	Russia France
Nationality	Russian
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques University of Miami
Alma mater	University of Bonn Moscow State University
Doctoral advisor	Don Bernard Zagier
Doctoral students	Dmitri Panov
Notable awards	EMS Prize(1992) Henri Poincaré Prize (1997) Fields Medal (1998) Crafoord Prize (2008) Shaw Prize (2012) Fundamental Physics Prize (2012) Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics (2014) [National Academy of Sciences (Foreign Associate)] (2015)

Maxim Lvovich Kontsevich (Russian: Макси́м Льво́вич Конце́вич;; born 25 August 1964) is a Russian and French mathematician. He holds both Russian and French citizenship. He is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. He received the Henri Poincaré Prize in 1997, the Fields Medal in 1998, the Crafoord Prize in 2008, the Shaw Prize and Fundamental Physics Prize in 2012, and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014.

Biography

He was born into the family of Lev Rafailovich Kontsevich, Soviet orientalist and author of the Kontsevich system. After ranking second in the All-Union Mathematics Olympiads, he attended Moscow State University but left without a degree in 1985 to become a researcher at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission in Moscow. In 1992 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Bonn under Don Bernard Zagier. His thesis outlines a proof of a conjecture by Edward Witten that two quantum gravitational models are equivalent.

His work concentrates on geometric aspects of mathematical physics, most notably on knot theory, quantization, and mirror symmetry. One of his results is a formal deformation quantization that holds for any Poisson manifold. He also introduced knot invariants defined by complicated integrals analogous to Feynman integrals. In topological field theory, he introduced the moduli space of stable maps, which may be considered a mathematically rigorous formulation of the Feynman integral for topological string theory.

Honors and awards

In 1998, he won the Fields Medal for his "contributions to four problems of Geometry". In July 2012, he was an inaugural awardee of the Fundamental Physics Prize, the creation of physicist and internet entrepreneur, Yuri Milner.

See also

• Kontsevich integral
• Homological mirror symmetry
• Motivic integration
• Kontsevich quantization formula
• Ring of periods

References

• Fields Medal citation at the website of the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians held in Beijing.
• Taubes, Clifford Henry (1998) "The work of Maxim Kontsevich". In Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. I (Berlin, 1998). Doc. Math., Extra Vol. I, 119–126.

External links

• .
• Maxim Kontsevich at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• AMS Profile of Maxim Kontsevich
• Official Homepage of Maxim Kontsevich