Svetlana Yakovlevna Jitomirskaya (born June 4, 1966) is a Soviet-born American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

working on

dynamical system In mathematics, a dynamical system is a system in which a Function (mathematics), function describes the time dependence of a Point (geometry), point in an ambient space. Examples include the mathematical models that describe the swinging of a ...

s and

mathematical physics Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematics, mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and t ...

.Jitomirskaya's CV
/ref> She is a distinguished professor of mathematics at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and pr ...

. She is best known for solving the ten martini problem along with mathematician

Artur Avila Artur Avila Cordeiro de Melo (born 29 June 1979) is a Brazilian and naturalized French mathematician working primarily in the fields of dynamical systems and spectral theory. He is one of the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal, being the first La ...

Education and career

Jitomirskaya was born and grew up in

Kharkiv Kharkiv ( uk, wikt:Харків, Ха́рків, ), also known as Kharkov (russian: Харькoв, ), is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine.Valentina Borok Valentina Mikhailovna Borok (9 July 1931 – 4 February 2004) was a Soviet Ukrainian mathematician. She is mainly known for her work on partial differential equations. Life Borok was born on July 9, 1931 in Kharkiv in Ukraine (then USSR), into ...

, and her father, Yakov Zhitomirskii, were professors of mathematics. Her undergraduate studies were at

Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU; russian: Московский государственный университет имени М. В. Ломоносова) is a public research university in Moscow, Russia and the most prestigious ...

, where she was a student of, among others,

Vladimir Arnold Vladimir Igorevich Arnold (alternative spelling Arnol'd, russian: link=no, Влади́мир И́горевич Арно́льд, 12 June 1937 – 3 June 2010) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. While he is best known for the Kolmogorov–A ...

and

Yakov Sinai Yakov Grigorevich Sinai (russian: link=no, Я́ков Григо́рьевич Сина́й; born September 21, 1935) is a Russian-American mathematician known for his work on dynamical systems. He contributed to the modern metric theory of dy ...

. She obtained her Ph.D. from Moscow State University in 1991 under the supervision of

. She joined the mathematics department at the

in 1991 as a lecturer, and she became an assistant professor there in 1994 and a full professor in 2000.

Honors

In 2005, she was awarded the

Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics The Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, also called the Satter Prize, is one of twenty-one prizes given out by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). It is presented biennially in recognition of an outstanding contribution to mathematics ...

, "for her pioneering work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization". She was an invited speaker at the 2002

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 ...

, in

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

. She was a plenary speaker at the 2022

, originally scheduled for

Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, congress organizers changed plans, and moved some events online, and others to Helsinki, Finland. Jitomirskaya's July 14 plenary address, Small denominators and multiplicative Jensen's formula, is available online. She received a

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in 1996. In 2018 she was named to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

. Jitomirskaya is the 2020 winner of the

Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics is an award given each year since 1959 jointly by the American Physical Society and American Institute of Physics. It is established by the Heineman Foundation in honour of Dannie Heineman. As of 2010 ...

, becoming the second woman to win the prize and the first woman to be the sole winner of the prize. The award citation credited her "for work on the

spectral theory In mathematics, spectral theory is an inclusive term for theories extending the eigenvector and eigenvalue theory of a single square matrix to a much broader theory of the structure of operators in a variety of mathematical spaces. It is a result o ...

of almost-periodic Schrödinger operators and related questions in dynamical systems. In particular, for her role in the solution of the Ten Martini problem, concerning the Cantor set nature of the spectrum of all almost Mathieu operators and in the development of the fundamental mathematical aspects of the localization and metal-insulator transition phenomena." In 2022, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. On July 2 2022, she received the inaugural Ladyzhenskaya Prize in Mathematical Physics (OAL Prize) “for her seminal and deep contributions to the spectral theory of almost periodic Schrödinger operators” https://2022.worldwomeninmaths.org/OAL-prize-winner.

Selected publications

*. *. *.

References

External links

Home page of Svetlana Jitomirskaya
*. * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Jitomirskaya, Svetlana 1966 births Moscow State University alumni University of California, Irvine faculty Ukrainian mathematicians Scientists from Kharkiv Ukrainian women mathematicians Ukrainian SSR emigrants to the United States Ukrainian Jews Living people Dynamical systems theorists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences