David Kazhdan
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David Kazhdan is an Israeli mathematician known for work in representation theory. The son of Alexander Kazhdan, he was born in 1946 in Moscow, USSR. He earned a doctorate under Alexandre Kirillov in 1969 and was a leading member of Israel Gelfand's school of mathematics. He is Jewish, and emigrated from the Soviet Union to take a position at Harvard University in 1975. He changed his official name, from Dmitri to David, and became an Orthodox Jew, also around that time. In 2005 he immigrated to Israel and is now a professor both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Harvard.
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 the Fields Medal, a prize for young mathematicians of outstanding reputation.
[edit] Family
His son, Eli Kazhdan, was director general of Natan Sharansky's Israel Ba-Aliya political party (now merged with Likud). His other son, Michael Kazhdan, is a professor of Computer Science at John Hopkins University.
