Vitali Davidovich Milman ( he, ויטלי מילמן; russian: Виталий Давидович Мильман) (born 23 August 1939) is a
mathematician specializing in
analysis. He is a professor at the
Tel Aviv University. In the past he was a President of the
Israel Mathematical Union and a member of the “
Aliyah
Aliyah (, ; he, עֲלִיָּה ''ʿălīyyā'', ) is the immigration of Jews from Jewish diaspora, the diaspora to, historically, the geographical Land of Israel, which is in the modern era chiefly represented by the Israel, State of Israel ...
” committee of Tel Aviv University.
Work
Milman received his
Ph.D. at
Kharkiv State University in 1965 under the direction of
Boris Levin.
In a 1971 paper, Milman gave a new proof of
Dvoretzky's theorem, stating that every convex body in dimension ''N'' has a section of dimension ''d(N)'', with ''d(N)'' tending to infinity with ''N'', that is arbitrarily close to being isometric to an ellipsoid. Milman's proof gives the optimal bound ''d(N)'' ≥ const log ''N''. In this proof, Milman put forth the
concentration of measure phenomenon which has since found numerous applications.
Milman made important contributions to the study of
Banach space
In mathematics, more specifically in functional analysis, a Banach space (pronounced ) is a complete normed vector space. Thus, a Banach space is a vector space with a metric that allows the computation of vector length and distance between vector ...
s of large (finite) dimension, which led to the development of
asymptotic geometric analysis
In analytic geometry, an asymptote () of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the ''x'' or ''y'' coordinates Limit of a function#Limits at infinity, tends to infinity. In pro ...
. His results in this field include
Milman's reverse Brunn–Minkowski inequality and the
quotient of subspace theorem.
Positions
He holds several positions including being the advisor to the
Israel Ministry of Science
The Ministry of Science and Technology is a government ministry in Israel, headed by the Science and Technology Minister. The portfolio has been renamed several times since its creation, and has previously included Culture and Sport, which is now ...
on the immigration of scientists, and being a member of the European Mathematical Union.
He is on the editorial boards of several journals, including
Geometric and Functional Analysis. He has published over 150 scientific publications, a monograph and eleven edited books. He has delivered lectures at Universities such as MIT, IAS Princeton, Berkeley, IHES Paris, Cambridge.
Awards and honors
Milman was an Invited Speaker of 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 ...
in 1986 in Berkeley and in 1998 in Berlin. He received the
Landau Prize in Mathematics
Landau ( pfl, Landach), officially Landau in der Pfalz, is an autonomous (''kreisfrei'') town surrounded by the Südliche Weinstraße ("Southern Wine Route") district of southern Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is a university town (since 1990) ...
in 2002 and the
EMET Prize in mathematics in 2007.
[
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
]
Family
Mathematics runs in the Milman family. His father is the mathematician David Milman, who devised the Krein–Milman theorem. His brother is the mathematician Pierre Milman and his son is the young mathematician Emanuel Milman.
Selected works
*.
Notes
External links
Vitali Milman's website
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Milman, Vitali
Ukrainian Jews
Soviet mathematicians
20th-century Israeli mathematicians
1939 births
Living people
Tel Aviv University faculty
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
National University of Kharkiv alumni
20th-century Ukrainian mathematicians