Grigory Margulis - Short Biography

Short Biography

Margulis was born in Moscow, Soviet Union. He received his PhD in 1970 from the Moscow State University, starting research in ergodic theory under the supervision of Yakov Sinai. Early work with David Kazhdan produced the Kazhdan–Margulis theorem, a basic result on discrete groups. His superrigidity theorem from 1975 clarified an area of classical conjectures about the characterisation of arithmetic groups amongst lattices in Lie groups.

He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1978, but was not permitted to travel to Helsinki to accept in person. His position improved, and in 1979 he visited Bonn, and was later able to travel freely, though he still worked in the Institute of Problems of Information Transmission, a research institute rather than a university. In 1991, Margulis accepted a professorial position at Yale University.

Margulis was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

In 2005, Margulis received the Wolf Prize for his contributions to theory of lattices and applications to ergodic theory, representation theory, number theory, combinatorics, and measure theory.