Vitali Milman

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Prof. Vitali Milman is a mathematician specializing in analysis. He is currently a professor at the Tel-Aviv University. In the past he was a President of the Israel Mathematical Union and a member of the “Aliyah” committee of Tel-Aviv University.

Milman received in Ph. D. at Kharkov State University in 1965 under direction of Boris Levin. He holds several important positions including being the advisor to the Israel Ministry of Science on the Immigration of Scientists and a member of the European Mathematical Union. Milman received the Landau Prize in Mathematics in 2002. He is on the editorial boards of several reputed journals. He has published over a 150 scientific publications, a monograph and eleven edited books. He has delivered lectures at many Universities such as MIT, IAS Princeton, Berkeley, IHES Paris, Cambridge.

In the famous 1971 paper, V.M. gave a new proof of Dvoretzky's theorem, stating that every convex body in dimension N has a section of dimension const log N that is isomorphic to an ellipsoid. In this proof, V.M. put forth the concentration of measure phenomenon which has since found numerous applications.

Math runs in the Milman family. His father is the mathematician David Milman who devised the Krein-Milman theorem. His brother is the mathematician Pierre Milman and his son is the young mathematician Emanuel Milman.