Yuri I. Manin - Life and Career

Life and Career

Manin gained a doctorate in 1960 at the Steklov Mathematics Institute as a student of Igor Shafarevich. He is now a Professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn, and a professor at Northwestern University.

Manin's early work included papers on the arithmetic and formal groups of abelian varieties, the Mordell conjecture in the function field case, and algebraic differential equations. The Gauss–Manin connection is a basic ingredient of the study of cohomology in families of algebraic varieties. He wrote an influential book on cubic surfaces and cubic forms, showing how to apply both classical and contemporary methods of algebraic geometry, as well as nonassociative algebra. He also indicated the role of the Brauer group, via Grothendieck's theory of global Azumaya algebras, in accounting for obstructions to the Hasse principle, setting off a generation of further work. He has also written on Yang-Mills theory, quantum information, and mirror symmetry.

Manin had over 40 doctoral students, including Vladimir Berkovich, Mariusz Wodzicki, Alexander Beilinson, Ivan Cherednik, Alexei Skorobogatov, Vladimir Drinfeld, Vyacheslav Shokurov, Arend Bayer and Victor Kolyvagin, as well as foreign students including Hà Huy Khoái, now the most senior mathematician in Vietnam. He was awarded the Schock Prize in 1999 and the Cantor Medal in 2002. In 1994, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics. In 2010, he received the Bolyai Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.