Hillel Furstenberg

Hillel (Harry) Furstenberg ( _he. הלל (הארי) פורסטנברג) is an Israeli mathematician, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups. He gained attention at an early stage in his career for producing an innovative topological proof of the infinitude of prime numbers. He proved unique ergodicity of horocycle flows on a compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces in the early 1970s. In 1977, he gave an ergodic theory reformulation, and subsequently proof, of Szemerédi's theorem. The "Furstenberg boundary" and "Furstenberg compactification" of a locally symmetric space are named after him.

Biography

Hillel Furstenberg was born in Berlin, in 1935, and soon emigrated to the US. In the Yeshiva University he concluded his BA and MSc studies in 1955. He obtained his Ph. D. under Salomon Bochner at Princeton University in 1958. After several years at the University of Minnesota he became a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965.

Awards

Furstenberg received the Harvey Prize from Technion (1993) and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2006/7.

See also

*Compactification (mathematics)
*Ratner's theorems

External links

* [http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/html/id.phtml?id=8122 Mathematics Genealogy page]
* [http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng_dev.pl?mesge116895485932688760 Press release]