Love and Math by Frenkel Edward

Author:Frenkel, Edward [Frenkel, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780465069958
Publisher: Basic Books

*Vera Serganova, the fourth recipient of the Harvard Prize Fellowship, came in the spring.

Chapter 14

Tying the Sheaves of Wisdom

The spring semester brought more visitors to Harvard, one of whom, Vladimir Drinfeld, changed the direction of my research, and in many ways, my mathematical career. And it all happened because of the Langlands Program.

I had heard about Drinfeld before. He was only thirty-six at the time, but already a legend. Six months after we met, he was awarded the Fields Medal, one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics, considered by many as an equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

Drinfeld published his first math paper at the age of seventeen, and by age twenty he was already breaking new ground in the Langlands Program. Originally from Kharkov, Ukraine, where his father was a well-known math professor, Drinfeld studied at Moscow University in the early 1970s. (At that time, Jews also had trouble gaining admission to MGU, but a certain percentage of Jewish students was admitted.) By the time he received his college degree from the MGU, he was already world-renowned for his work, and he was accepted to the graduate school, which was extraordinary for a Jewish student. His advisor was Yuri Ivanovich Manin, one of the world’s most original and influential mathematicians.

Even Drinfeld, however, was not able to escape anti-Semitism entirely. After getting his Ph.D., he was unable to get a job in Moscow and had to spend three years at a provincial university in Ufa, an industrial city in the Ural Mountains. Drinfeld was reluctant to go to Ufa, not least because there were no mathematicians there working in the areas he cared about. But as the result of his stay in Ufa, Drinfeld wrote an important work in the theory of integrable systems, a subject that was quite far from his interests, together with a local mathematician Vladimir Sokolov. The integrable systems they created are now known as the Drinfeld–Sokolov systems. After three years in Ufa, Drinfeld was finally able to secure a job in his hometown, at the Kharkov Institute for Low Temperature Physics. This was a relatively comfortable job, and he could stay close to his family, but being in Kharkov, Drinfeld was isolated from the Soviet mathematical community, which was concentrated in Moscow and, to a lesser extent, St. Petersburg.

Despite all this, working essentially alone, Drinfeld kept producing marvelous results in diverse areas of math and physics. In addition to proving important conjectures within the Langlands Program and opening a new chapter in the theory of integrable systems with Sokolov, he also developed the general theory of quantum groups (originally discovered by Kolya Reshetikhin and his co-authors), and many other things. The breadth of his contributions was staggering.

Attempts were made to hire Drinfeld in Moscow. I’ve been told that physicist Alexander Belavin, for example, tried to bring Drinfeld to the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics near Moscow. To raise the chances of success, Belavin and Drinfeld solved together an important problem of classification of solutions to the “classical Yang–Baxter equation,” which many physicists were interested in at the time.

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