Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences ，Member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States ， Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Andrei Okounkov

Academician

Andrei Okounkov, born on July 26, 1969, in Moscow, Russia, is a mathematician, Fields Medal winner, a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Samuel Eilenberg Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University, a full professor at the Skolkovo Institute for Science and Technology, and the academic director of the International Laboratory of Representation Theory and Mathematical Physics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Russia.

Andrei Okounkov graduated with the highest honors in Mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1993; earned his Doctorate in Mathematics from the same university in 1995; conducted research at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley from 1996 to 1997; was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Chicago in 1997; received tenure at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999; was appointed as a professor at Princeton University in 2002; was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Madrid in 2006; left Princeton University in 2010 to become a professor of mathematics at Columbia University in New York; was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States in 2012; was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016; was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2020; and was elected a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in November 2023.

Andrei Okounkov contributed greatly to the fields of asymptotic combinatorics, probability, representation theory and algebraic geometry. As an extremely versatile mathematician, he found a wide array of applications of his methods. His early results include a proof of a conjecture of Olshanski on the representations theory of groups with infinite-dimensional duals. He gave the first proof of the celebrated Baik Deift-Johansson conjecture, which states that the asymptotics of random partitions distributed according to the Plancherel measure coincides with that of the eigenvalues of large Hermitian matrices. An important and influential result of Okounkov is a formula he found in joint work with Borodin, which expresses a general Toeplitz determinant as the Fredholm determinant of the product of two associated Hankel operators. The new techniques of working with random partitions invented and successfully developed by Okounkov lead to a striking array of applications in a wide variety of fields: topology of moduli spaces, ergodic theory, the theory of random surfaces and algebraic geometry.