Rostislav Grigorchuk

Rostislav Grigorchuk

Rostislav Ivanovich Grigorchuk (Ukrainian: Ростислав Івaнович Григорчук, Russian: Ростисла́в Ива́нович Григорчу́к; b. February 23, 1953) is a Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician working in the area of group theory. He holds the rank of Distinguished Professor in the Mathematics Department of Texas A&M University. Grigorchuk is particularly well known for having constructed, in a 1984 paper, the first example of a finitely generated group of intermediate growth, thus answering an important problem posed by John Milnor in 1968. This group is now known as the Grigorchuk group and it is one of the important objects studied in geometric group theory, particularly in the study of branch groups, automata groups and iterated monodromy groups.