Victor Alexandrovich Kolyvagin (russian: Виктор Александрович Колывагин, born 11 March, 1955) is a

Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...

mathematician who wrote a series of papers on

Euler system In mathematics, an Euler system is a collection of compatible elements of Galois cohomology groups indexed by fields. They were introduced by in his work on Heegner points on modular elliptic curves, which was motivated by his earlier paper and ...

s, leading to breakthroughs on the

Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture In mathematics, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture (often called the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture) describes the set of rational solutions to equations defining an elliptic curve. It is an open problem in the field of number theory an ...

, and Iwasawa's conjecture for

cyclotomic fields In number theory, a cyclotomic field is a number field obtained by adjoining a complex root of unity to , the field of rational numbers. Cyclotomic fields played a crucial role in the development of modern algebra and number theory because of ...

. His work also influenced

Andrew Wiles Sir Andrew John Wiles (born 11 April 1953) is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awar ...

's work on

Fermat's Last Theorem In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's conjecture, especially in older texts) states that no three positive integers , , and satisfy the equation for any integer value of greater than 2. The cases and have been k ...

Career

Kolyvagin received his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1981 from

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 his advisor was

Yuri I. Manin Yuri Ivanovich Manin (russian: Ю́рий Ива́нович Ма́нин; born 16 February 1937) is a Russian mathematician, known for work in algebraic geometry and diophantine geometry, and many expository works ranging from mathematical log ...

. He then worked at Steklov Institute of Mathematics in

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

until 1994. Since 1994 he has been a professor of mathematics in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. He was a professor at

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

until 2002 when he became the first person to hold the

Mina Rees Mina Spiegel Rees (August 2, 1902 – October 25, 1997) was an American mathematician. She was the first female President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1971) and head of the mathematics department of the Office of N ...

Chair in mathematics at the Graduate Center Faculty at The

City University of New York The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven Upper divis ...

Awards

In 1990 he received the of the

USSR Academy of Sciences The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991, uniting the country's leading scientists, subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (until 1946 ...

References

Link

*
Kolyvagin's Biography
1955 births Living people Johns Hopkins University faculty City University of New York faculty CUNY Graduate Center faculty Russian emigrants to the United States 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Number theorists Russian mathematicians Moscow State University alumni {{Russia-mathematician-stub