David Kazhdan

Professor David Kazhdan is a Professor of Mathematics and Director of Interdisciplinary Research Center for Representation Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Additionally, he is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Harvard University. Kazhdan is a co-founder of geometric representation theory and co-discoverer of Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials, fundamental in representation theory. Kazhdan was a researcher in the Laboratory of Mathematical Methods in Biology at Moscow State University (1969-1975). He also discovered Kazhdan's property and jointly, with Margulis, proved Selberg's conjecture, fundamental in the theory of discrete groups. Kazhdan made important contributions to the theory of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras, quantum groups, representation theory of Hecke algebras, Langlands program, differential geometry, and model theory. For his work, Professor Kazhdan received the Israel Prize and Rothschild Prize in mathematics and also memberships at the MacArthur Fellowship ('90-'95), United States National Academy of Sciences, and Israel Academy of Sciences. He is co-editor of Quantum Fields and Strings: A Course for Mathematicians (1999), and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.