Vladimir Drinfel'd

Vladimir Gershonovich Drinfel'd (Russian: Владимир Гершонович Дринфельд) is a mathematician born February 4, 1954 in the Ukrainian SSR.

At the age of 15 he won a gold medal with the perfect score in the International Mathematics Olympiad in 1969, representing the Soviet Union, and entered the Moscow State University the same year, graduating from it in 1974.

In collaboration with his advisor Yuri Manin, he constructed the moduli space of Yang-Mills instantons, a result which was proved independently by Michael Atiyah and Nigel Hitchin. In 1986, he gave a seminal address to the International Congress of Mathematicians at Berkeley, where he coined the term "Quantum group" in reference to Hopf algebras which are deformations of simple Lie algebras, and connected them to the study of the Yang-Baxter equation, which is a necessary condition for the solvability of statistical mechanical models. He also generalized Hopf algebras to quasi-Hopf algebras, and introduced the study of Drinfeld twists, which can be used to factorize the R-matrix corresponding to the solution of the Yang-Baxter equation associated with a quasitriangular Hopf algebra.

He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1990, and is currently the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.

He is known for work in number theory and other fields; in particular for his proof of a substantive part of the Langlands program for GL₂ of a function field of an algebraic curve over a finite field, this being the first major non-abelian case over a global field that was known.