Professors Beilinson, Drinfield elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Two University of Chicago mathematics professors have been elected as fellows in this year's class of American Academy of Arts and Sciences: Alexander Beilinson, the David & Mary Winton Green University Professor in Mathematics; and Vladimir Drinfeld, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected 191 new fellows and 22 new foreign honorary members this year. The 213 scholars, scientists, artists, and civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders come from 20 states and 15 countries. The 2008 fellows also represent more than 50 universities and more than a dozen corporations, as well as museums, national laboratories, private research institutes, media outlets and foundations.
Fellows and foreign honorary members are nominated and elected to the academy by current members. A broad-based membership, which is composed of scholars and practitioners from mathematics, physics, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts, public affairs and business, gives the academy a unique capacity to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary studies and public policy research.
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock and other scholar-patriots, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected as its members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation.
The election was held during the business session of the 145th annual meeting of the academy. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,041. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the academy, with citizenship outside the United States. Tuesday's election brings the total number of foreign associates to 397.
Beilinson focuses his work on arithmetic algebraic geometry. He has made additional contributions to representation theory and mathematical physics. Mathematicians expect his "Beilinson Conjectures" to serve as a guiding influence in his field for many years.
Beilinson often collaborates with Drinfeld. They have become well known in mathematical circles for co-organizing seminar series of topics of common interest. Together, they spent years reworking the theory of vertex algebras, jointly publishing a monograph on the topic in 2004.
Beilinson joined the University in 1998. From 1989 until 1998, he spent most fall semesters teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor of mathematics and worked the remainder of the year as a researcher at the Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka, Russia.
From 1980 to 1988, Beilinson conducted mathematical research at a Moscow cardiological center. He received the Moscow Mathematical Society prize in 1984.
Drinfeld conducts most of his work in the geometric Langlands program, which is a part of geometric representation theory. In 1990, he received the Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent to the Nobel Prize. The medals are awarded to no fewer than two and no more than four mathematicians under the age of 40 every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
Drinfeld joined the Chicago faculty in 1999, shortly after the appointments of Beilinson, Nikolai Nadirashvili (now of France's National Center for Scientific Research), and Ridgway Scott, the Louis Block Professor in Computer Science and Mathematics. These appointments prompted the Chronicle of Higher Education to report that, "Three mathematicians from the former Soviet Union plus one leading American mathematician equal a stellar recruiting year for the University of Chicago's mathematics department."
Drinfeld came to Chicago from Ukraine's Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering, where he had worked since 1981. He also has taught at Bashkir State University in Ufa in the former Soviet Union and at Ukraine's Kharkiv National University.