Boris Tsirelson

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Boris Tsirelson while a first-year student, in 1967.

Boris Semyonovich Tsirelson (Hebrew: בוריס סמיונוביץ' צירלסון‎, Russian: Борис Семенович Цирельсон) is a Soviet-Israeli mathematician and Professor of Mathematics in the Tel Aviv University in Israel.

[edit] Biography

Boris Tsirelson was born in Leningrad to a Russian Jewish family. From his father Simeon's side, he is the great-nephew of rabbi Yehuda Leib Tsirelson, chief rabbi of Bessarabia from 1918 to 1941, and a prominent posek and Jewish leader.

B.T. obtained his M.S. from the university of Leningrad; he stayed in Leningrad to pursue his graduate studies, finishing his PhD in 1975.

Later, he participated in the refusenik movement, but only received permission to emigrate to Israel in 1991. Since then, he is a professor in Tel-Aviv University.

[edit] Contributions to mathematics

Tsirelson has made notable contributions to probability theory and functional analysis. They include:

Tsirelson's bound, in quantum mechanics, is an inequality, related to issues of nonlocality and hidden variables.
Tsirelson space is an example of a reflexive Banach space in which neither a l^p space nor a c₀ space can be embedded.
The Tsirelson drift, a counterexample in the theory of stochastic differential equations.
Gaussian isoperimetric inequality (proved by V. Sudakov, B. Tsirelson, and independently by Ch. Borell), stating that affine halfspaces are the isoperimetric sets for the Gaussian measure.