Efim Zelmanov

Efim Zelmanov is the Rita L. Atkinson Chair in Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He attended Novosibirsk State University, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1980 having had his research supervised by Shirshov and Bokut. His Ph.D. thesis completely changed the whole of the subject of Jordan algebras by extending results from the classical theory of finite dimensional Jordan algebras to infinite dimensional Jordan algebras. Dr. Zelmanov described this work on Jordan algebras in his invited lecture to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Warsaw in 1983. In 1980 Dr. Zelmanov was appointed as a Junior Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR at Novosibirsk. By 1986 he had been promoted to Leading Researcher. In 1987 Dr. Zelmanov solved one of the big open questions in the theory of Lie algebras. He proved that the Engel identity ad y(n)= 0 implies that the algebra is necessarily nilpotent. This was a classical result for finite dimensional Lie algebras but Dr. Zelmanov proved that the result also held also for infinite dimensional Lie algebras. In 1990 Dr. Zelmanov was appointed a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held this appointment until 1994 when he was appointed to the University of Chicago. In 1995 he spent the year at Yale University. In 1991, Dr. Zelmanov went on to settle one of the most fundamental results in the theory of groups: the restricted Burnside problem, which had occupied group theorists throughout the 20th century. In 1994 Dr. Zelmanov was awarded a Fields Medal for this work at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1994. He is also a recipient of an Andre Aisenstadt Prize and a College de France Medal. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He was a member of the PIMS SRP from 2005 - 2009.