Alexander Beilinson

Last updated
Alexander Beilinson
Alexander Beilinson.jpg
Beilinson (left) with his students
Born (1957-06-13) June 13, 1957 (age 66)
Moscow, Soviet Union
NationalityRussian
Known for Beilinson conjectures
Beilinson element
Beilinson regulator
Beilinson–Bernstein localization
Beilinson–Lichtenbaum conjecture
Beilinson–Parshin conjecture
Chiral algebra
Chiral homology
Decomposition theorem
Lie-* algebra
Perverse sheaves
t-structure
Tate vector space
ChildrenHelen; Vera
Awards Ostrowski Prize (1999)
Wolf Prize (2018)
Shaw Prize (2020)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
Institutions University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor Yuri I. Manin
Doctoral students Lorenzo Ramero

Alexander A. Beilinson (born 1957) is the David and Mary Winton Green University professor at the University of Chicago and works on mathematics. His research has spanned representation theory, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. In 1999, Beilinson was awarded the Ostrowski Prize with Helmut Hofer. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [1] In 2018, he received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics [2] and in 2020 the Shaw Prize in Mathematics. [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Beilinson was born in Moscow of mostly Russian descent while his paternal grandfather was Jewish. Nevertheless he was discriminated because of his Jewish surname, and was not admitted to Moscow State University. He went to Pedagogical Institute instead and transferred to Moscow State University when he was a third year student. [4]

Work

In 1978, Beilinson published a paper on coherent sheaves and several problems in linear algebra. His two-page note in the journal Functional Analysis and Its Applications was one of the papers on the study of derived categories of coherent sheaves.

In 1981, Beilinson announced a proof of the Kazhdan–Lusztig conjectures and Jantzen conjectures with Joseph Bernstein. Independent of Beilinson and Bernstein, Brylinski and Kashiwara obtained a proof of the Kazhdan–Lusztig conjectures. [5] However, the proof of Beilinson–Bernstein introduced a method of localization. This established a geometric description of the entire category of representations of the Lie algebra, by "spreading out" representations as geometric objects living on the flag variety. These geometric objects naturally have an intrinsic notion of parallel transport: they are D-modules.

In 1982, Beilinson published his own conjectures about the existence of motivic cohomology groups for schemes, provided as hypercohomology groups of a complex of abelian groups and related to algebraic K-theory by a motivic spectral sequence, analogous to the Atiyah–Hirzebruch spectral sequence in algebraic topology. These conjectures have since been dubbed the Beilinson-Soulé conjectures; they are intertwined with Vladimir Voevodsky's program to develop a homotopy theory for schemes.

In 1984, Beilinson published the paper Higher Regulators and values of L-functions, in which he related higher regulators for K-theory and their relationship to L-functions. The paper also provided a generalization to arithmetic varieties of the Lichtenbaum conjecture for K-groups of number rings, the Hodge conjecture, the Tate conjecture about algebraic cycles, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture about elliptic curves, and Bloch's conjecture about K2 of elliptic curves.

Beilinson continued to work on algebraic K-theory throughout the mid-1980s. He collaborated with Pierre Deligne on the developing a motivic interpretation of Don Zagier's polylogarithm conjectures.

From the early 1990s onwards, Beilinson worked with Vladimir Drinfeld to rebuild the theory of vertex algebras. After some informal circulation, this research was published in 2004 in a form of a monograph on chiral algebras. This has led to new advances in conformal field theory, string theory and the geometric Langlands program. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008. [6] He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1994 and again from 1996 to 1998. [7]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pierre Deligne</span> Belgian mathematician

Pierre René, Viscount Deligne is a Belgian mathematician. He is best known for work on the Weil conjectures, leading to a complete proof in 1973. He is the winner of the 2013 Abel Prize, 2008 Wolf Prize, 1988 Crafoord Prize, and 1978 Fields Medal.

Motivic cohomology is an invariant of algebraic varieties and of more general schemes. It is a type of cohomology related to motives and includes the Chow ring of algebraic cycles as a special case. Some of the deepest problems in algebraic geometry and number theory are attempts to understand motivic cohomology.

Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfeld, surname also romanized as Drinfel'd, is a renowned mathematician from the former USSR, who emigrated to the United States and is currently working at the University of Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Grojnowski</span>

Ian Grojnowski is a mathematician working at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge.

The mathematical term perverse sheaves refers to the objects of certain abelian categories associated to topological spaces, which may be a real or complex manifold, or more general topologically stratified spaces, possibly singular.

In mathematics, a D-module is a module over a ring D of differential operators. The major interest of such D-modules is as an approach to the theory of linear partial differential equations. Since around 1970, D-module theory has been built up, mainly as a response to the ideas of Mikio Sato on algebraic analysis, and expanding on the work of Sato and Joseph Bernstein on the Bernstein–Sato polynomial.

In the mathematical field of representation theory, a Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomial is a member of a family of integral polynomials introduced by David Kazhdan and George Lusztig (1979). They are indexed by pairs of elements y, w of a Coxeter group W, which can in particular be the Weyl group of a Lie group.

Jean-Luc Brylinski is a French-American mathematician. Educated at the Lycée Pasteur and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, after an appointment as researcher with the C. N. R. S., he became a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. He proved the Kazhdan–Lusztig conjectures with Masaki Kashiwara. He has also worked on gerbes, cyclic homology, Quillen bundles, and geometric class field theory, among other geometric and algebraic topics.

In mathematics, Deligne–Lusztig theory is a way of constructing linear representations of finite groups of Lie type using ℓ-adic cohomology with compact support, introduced by Pierre Deligne and George Lusztig (1976).

In mathematics, the Springer representations are certain representations of the Weyl group W associated to unipotent conjugacy classes of a semisimple algebraic group G. There is another parameter involved, a representation of a certain finite group A(u) canonically determined by the unipotent conjugacy class. To each pair (u, φ) consisting of a unipotent element u of G and an irreducible representation φ of A(u), one can associate either an irreducible representation of the Weyl group, or 0. The association

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Ginzburg</span> Russian American mathematician (born 1957)

Victor Ginzburg is a Russian American mathematician who works in representation theory and in noncommutative geometry. He is known for his contributions to geometric representation theory, especially, for his works on representations of quantum groups and Hecke algebras, and on the geometric Langlands program. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago.

Matthias Flach is a German mathematician, professor and former executive officer for mathematics at California Institute of Technology.

In mathematics, Deligne cohomology is the hypercohomology of the Deligne complex of a complex manifold. It was introduced by Pierre Deligne in unpublished work in about 1972 as a cohomology theory for algebraic varieties that includes both ordinary cohomology and intermediate Jacobians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Deninger</span> German mathematician

Christopher Deninger is a German mathematician at the University of Münster. Deninger's research focuses on arithmetic geometry, including applications to L-functions.

Derived algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics that generalizes algebraic geometry to a situation where commutative rings, which provide local charts, are replaced by either differential graded algebras, simplicial commutative rings or -ring spectra from algebraic topology, whose higher homotopy groups account for the non-discreteness of the structure sheaf. Grothendieck's scheme theory allows the structure sheaf to carry nilpotent elements. Derived algebraic geometry can be thought of as an extension of this idea, and provides natural settings for intersection theory of singular algebraic varieties and cotangent complexes in deformation theory, among the other applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geordie Williamson</span> Australian mathematician

Geordie Williamson is an Australian mathematician at the University of Sydney. He became the youngest living Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36.

Vadim V. Schechtman is a Russian mathematician who teaches in Toulouse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Geisser</span> German mathematician

Thomas Hermann Geisser is a German mathematician working at Rikkyo University. He works in the field of arithmetic geometry, motivic cohomology and algebraic K-theory.

References

  1. National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected, National Academy of Sciences, May 2, 2017.
  2. "Paul McCartney among 9 Wolf Prize recipients". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. Retrieved May 21, 2020.
  3. "The Shaw Prize". www.shawprize.org. Retrieved May 21, 2020.
  4. Fuchs, Dmitry. "On Soviet Mathematics of the 1950s and 1960s" (PDF). pp. 215–216.
  5. Brylinski, Jean-Luc; Kashiwara, Masaki (October 1981). "Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture and holonomic systems". Inventiones Mathematicae . Springer-Verlag. 64 (3): 387–410. Bibcode:1981InMat..64..387B. doi:10.1007/BF01389272. ISSN   0020-9910. S2CID   18403883.
  6. "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 30, 2011.
  7. "Institute for Advanced Study: A Community of Scholars". Archived from the original on January 6, 2013. Retrieved May 21, 2020.