David Kazhdan
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David Kazhdan is an American mathematician, known for work in representation theory. Son of Alexander Kazhdan. He was born in the USSR, where his doctoral adviser was Alexandre Kirillov (doctorate 1969). He was a leading member of Israel Gelfand's school. He is Jewish, and emigrated from the Soviet Union to take a position at Harvard University in 1975, to escape the conditions of anti-semitism that then prevailed. (He changed his official name, from Dmitri to David, and embraced Judaism as religion, also around that time.) He is as of 2005 a Professor both at Harvard and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He is known for many fertile collaborations: with Israel Gelfand, Victor Kac, George Lusztig (on an influential Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture on Verma modules), with Grigory Margulis (Kazhdan-Margulis theorem), with Yuval Flicker and S. J. Patterson on the representations of metaplectic groups. Kazhdan's property (T) is now a much-studied aspect of representation theory.
Kazhdan held a MacArthur Fellowship from 1990 to 1995. One of his students was Vladimir Voevodsky, a recipient of Fields Medal, a prize for young mathematicians of outstanding reputation.
