Sorin Teodor Popa (24 March 1953) is a

Romanian American Romanian Americans are Americans who have Romanian ancestry. According to the 2017 American Community Survey, 478,278 Americans indicated Romanian as their first or second ancestry, however other sources provide higher estimates, which are most ...

mathematician working on

operator algebras In functional analysis, a branch of mathematics, an operator algebra is an algebra of continuous linear operators on a topological vector space, with the multiplication given by the composition of mappings. The results obtained in the study ...

. He is a professor at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

Biography

Popa earned his PhD from the

University of Bucharest The University of Bucharest ( ro, Universitatea din București), commonly known after its abbreviation UB in Romania, is a public university founded in its current form on by a decree of Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza to convert the former Princel ...

in 1983 under the supervision of Dan-Virgil Voiculescu, with thesis ''Studiul unor clase de subalgebre ale

C^*

-algebrelor''. He has advised 15 doctoral students at UCLA, including Adrian Ioana.

Honors and awards

In 1990 Popa was an invited speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

(ICM) in

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

, where he gave a talk on "Subfactors and Classifications in von Neumann algebras". He was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1995. In 2006 he gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in

Madrid Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...

on "Deformation and Rigidity for group actions and Von Neumann Algebras". In 2009 he was awarded the

Ostrowski Prize The Ostrowski Prize is a mathematics award given every odd year for outstanding mathematical achievement judged by an international jury from the universities of Basel, Jerusalem, Waterloo and the academies of Denmark and the Netherlands. Alexand ...

, and in 2010 the E. H. Moore Prize. He is one of the inaugural fellows of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Selected publications

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References

External links

Homepage of Sorin Popa at the University of California, Los Angeles

UCLA – Sorin Popa elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Popa, Sorin 1953 births Living people Scientists from Bucharest University of Bucharest alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty Romanian emigrants to the United States 20th-century Romanian mathematicians 21st-century Romanian mathematicians 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Algebraists Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences