Maxim Kontsevich

Maxim Kontsevich (Russian: Максим Концевич) (born August 25, 1964) is a Russian mathematician. He received a Fields Medal in 1998, at the 23rd International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.

[edit] Biography

After ranking second in the All-Union Mathematics Olympiads, he attended Moscow State University but left without a degree in 1985 to become a researcher at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission in Moscow [1]. In 1992 he received his Ph.D. at the University of Bonn under Don Bernard Zagier. His thesis proves a conjecture by Edward Witten that two quantum gravitational models are equivalent. Currently he is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) in Bures-sur-Yvette, France and visiting professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.

His work concentrates on geometric aspects of mathematical physics, most notably on knot theory, quantization, and mirror symmetry. His most famous result is a formal deformation quantization that holds for any Poisson manifold. He also introduced knot invariants defined by complicated integrals analogous to Feynman integrals. And in topological field theory, he introduced the moduli space of stable maps, which may be considered a mathematically rigorous formulation of the Feynman integral for topological string theory. These results are a part of his "contributions to four problems of geometry" for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.

Fields Medal citation at the website of the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians held in Beijing.
Taubes, Clifford Henry (1998) "The work of Maxim Kontsevich". In Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. I (Berlin, 1998). Doc. Math., Extra Vol. I, 119–126.

Fields Medalists

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