Hillel Furstenberg
Harry Fürstenberg | |
|---|---|
 Hillel Fürstenberg in 1992 (photo by George Bergman) | |
| Born | September 29, 1935 |
| Nationality | American Israeli |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Known for | proof of Szemerédi's theorem Fürstenberg compactification |
| Awards | Israel Prize Harvey Prize Wolf Prize |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Doctoral advisor | Salomon Bochner |
| Doctoral students | Alexander Lubotzky Vitaly Bergelson |
Hillel (Harry) Fürstenberg (Hebrew: הלל (הארי) פורסטנברג) (born September 29, 1935) is an American-Israeli mathematician, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups. He gained attention at an early stage in his career for producing an innovative topological proof of the infinitude of prime numbers. He proved unique ergodicity of horocycle flows on a compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces in the early 1970s. In 1977, he gave an ergodic theory reformulation, and subsequently proof, of Szemerédi's theorem. The Fürstenberg boundary and Fürstenberg compactification of a locally symmetric space are named after him.
Biography
Hillel Fürstenberg was born in Germany, in 1935, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the Yeshiva University he concluded his BA and MSc studies in 1955. He obtained his Ph. D. under Salomon Bochner at Princeton University in 1958. After several years at the University of Minnesota he became a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965.
Awards
- 1993 – Fürstenberg received the Israel Prize, for exact sciences.[1]
- 1993 – Fürstenberg received the Harvey Prize from Technion.
- 2006/7 – He received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.
References
External links
See also
- 1935 births
- American mathematicians
- Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Living people
- Israel Prize in exact science recipients
- Israel Prize in exact science recipients who were mathematicians
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem faculty
- Members of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
- Israeli mathematicians
- Princeton University alumni
- University of Minnesota faculty
- Wolf Prize in Mathematics laureates
- Yeshiva University alumni
- German Jews
- American people of German-Jewish descent
- American Jews
- Israeli Jews