Andrei Yuryevich Okounkov (Russian: Андрей Юрьевич Окуньков, Andrej Okun'kov) (born 1969) is a Russian mathematician who works on representation theory and its applications to algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, probability theory and special functions.

Education and career

He received his doctorate at Moscow State University in 1995 under Alexander Kirillov. He has been a professor at Princeton University since 2002, and was previously an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley and an instructor at the University of Chicago.

Work

He has worked on the representation theory of infinite symmetric groups, the statistics of plane partitions, and the quantum cohomology of the Hilbert scheme of points in the complex plane. Much of his work on Hilbert schemes was joint with Rahul Pandharipande.

Okounkov along with Pandharipande, Nikita Nekrasov, and Davesh Maulik, has formulated well-known conjectures relating the Gromov-Witten invariants and Donaldson-Thomas invariants of threefolds.

Okounkov has an Erdős number of at most three, via Anatoly Vershik and Gregory A. Freiman.

In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to bridging probability, representation theory and algebraic geometry."[1]

References

1. ^ "Information about Andrei Okounkov, Fields Medal winner", ICM Press Release

Links

* Andrei Okounkov old home page at Berkeley

* EMS Prize 2004 citation

* Fields Medal citation

* Andrei Okounkov's articles on the Arxiv

* Daily Princetonian story