Hillel Furstenberg

Harry Furstenberg
225px Hillel Furstenberg in 1992
Born	(1935-09-29) September 29, 1935 Berlin
Nationality	American Israeli
Fields	Mathematics
Alma mater	Princeton University
Doctoral advisor	Salomon Bochner
Doctoral students	Alexander Lubotzky Vitaly Bergelson Yuval Peres Alexander Fish
Known for	Proof of Szemerédi's theorem Furstenberg compactification
Notable awards	Israel Prize Harvey Prize Wolf Prize

Hillel (Harry) Furstenberg (Hebrew: הלל (הארי) פורסטנברג‎) (born September 29, 1935) is an American-Israeli mathematician, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups.

Biography

Hillel Furstenberg was born in Germany, in 1935, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He attended Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy and then Yeshiva University, where he concluded his BA and MSc studies in 1955. He obtained his Ph. D. under Salomon Bochner at Princeton University in 1958. After several years at the University of Minnesota he became a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965.

He gained attention at an early stage in his career for producing an innovative topological proof of the infinitude of prime numbers. He proved unique ergodicity of horocycle flows on a compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces in the early 1970s. In 1977, he gave an ergodic theory reformulation, and subsequently proof, of Szemerédi's theorem. The Furstenberg boundary and Furstenberg compactification of a locally symmetric space are named after him.

Awards

• 1993 – Furstenberg received the Israel Prize, for exact sciences.
• 1993 – Furstenberg received the Harvey Prize from Technion.
• 2006/7 – He received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

Selected publications

• Furstenberg, Harry, Stationary processes and prediction theory, Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1960.
• Furstenberg, Harry, Recurrence in ergodic theory and combinatorial number theory, Princeton, NJ : Princeton Univ. Press, 1981.

See also

• Compactification (mathematics)
• Ratner's theorems
• List of Israel Prize recipients

External links

• .
• Mathematics Genealogy page
• Press release
• Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Hebrew)