Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro
| Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
30 March 1929 Moscow, Soviet Union |
| Died | 21 February 2009 (aged 79) Tel-Aviv, Israel |
| Nationality | Soviet Union-Russian-Israeli |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions |
Moscow State University, Steklov Institute, Yale, Tel-Aviv University |
| Alma mater | Moscow Pedagogical Institute, Ph.D. 1954 |
| Doctoral advisor | Alexander Buchstab |
| Doctoral students |
James Cogdell Boris Moishezon Alexander Ovseevich Ze'ev Rudnick Mina Teicher Andrei Toom Leonid Vaseršteĭn Ernest Vinberg |
| Known for | Automorphic forms, L-functions |
| Notable awards |
Israel Prize (1981) Wolf Prize (1990) |
Ilya Piatetski-Shapiro (Hebrew: איליה פיאטצקי-שפירו; Russian: Илья́ Ио́сифович Пяте́цкий-Шапи́ро; 30 March 1929 – 21 February 2009) was a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician. During a career that spanned 60 years he made major contributions to applied science as well as theoretical mathematics. In the last forty years his research focused on pure mathematics; in particular, analytic number theory, group representations and algebraic geometry. His main contribution and impact was in the area of automorphic forms and L-functions.
For the last 30 years of his life he suffered from Parkinson's disease. However, with the help of his wife Edith, he was able to continue to work and do mathematics at the highest level, even when he was barely able to walk and speak.
Ilya was born in 1929 in Moscow, Soviet Union. Both his father, Iosif Grigor'evich, and mother, Sofia Arkadievna, were from traditional Jewish families, but which had become assimilated. His father was from Berdichev, a small city in the Ukraine, with a largely Jewish population. His mother was from Gomel, a similar small city in Belorussia. Both parents' families were middle-class, but they sank into poverty after the October revolution of 1917.
Ilya became interested in mathematics at the age of 10, struck, as he wrote in his short memoir, "by the charm and unusual beauty of negative numbers", which his father, a PhD in chemical engineering, showed him.
In 1952, Piatetski-Shapiro won the Moscow Mathematical Society Prize for a Young Mathematician for work done while still an undergraduate at Moscow University. His winning paper contained a solution to the problem of the French analyst Raphaël Salem on sets of uniqueness of trigonometric series. The award was especially remarkable because of the atmosphere of strong anti-Semitism in Soviet Union at that time.
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