Igor Frenkel
| Igor Frenkel | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 22, 1952 Leningrad, Soviet Union |
| Residence | New Haven |
| Citizenship | American |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Yale University |
| Alma mater | Saint Petersburg State University (Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет) Yale University |
| Doctoral advisor | Howard Garland |
| Doctoral students | Pavel Etingof Mikhail Khovanov Alexander Kirillov, Jr. Anthony Licata Alistair Savage |
Igor Borisovich Frenkel (born April 22, 1952) is a mathematician at Yale University working in representation theory and mathematical physics.
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[edit] Biography
Born in Leningrad, USSR (Now St. Petersburg, Russia), Frenkel emigrated to the United States in 1979. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1980 with a dissertation on the "Orbital Theory for Affine Lie Algebras." He held positions in IAS and MSRI, and a tenured professorhip at Rutgers University, before taking his current job of tenured professor at Yale University.
[edit] Mathematical work
In collaboration with James Lepowsky and Arne Meurman, he constructed the monster vertex algebra, a vertex algebra which provides a representation of the monster group.[1]
Around the year 1990, as a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Frenkel worked on the mathematical theory of knots, hoping to develop a theory in which the knot would be seen as a physical object. He continued to develop the idea with his student Mikhail Khovanov, and their collaboration ultimately led to the discovery of Khovanov homology, a refinement of the Jones polynomial, in 2002.[2]
[edit] References
- ^ Frenkel, Igor; Lepowsky, James; Meurman, Arne (1988). Vertex operator algebras and the Monster. Pure and Applied Mathematics. 134. Boston: Academic Press. ISBN 0-12-267065-5.
- ^ Witten, Edward (Spring 2011), "Knots and Quantum Theory", The Institute Letter, http://www.sns.ias.edu/~witten/papers/KnotsandPhysics.pdf, retrieved 17 August 2011
[edit] External links
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