Dan-Virgil Voiculescu

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Dan-Virgil Voiculescu (b. 1949 in Bucharest, Romania) is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked in single operator theory, operator K-theory and von Neumann algebras. More recently, he developed free probability theory.

Voiculescu studied at the University of Bucharest, receiving his PhD in 1977 under the direction of Ciprian Foiaş. He was an assistant at the University of Bucharest (1972-1973), a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy (1973-1975), and a researcher at INCREST (1975-1986). He came to Berkeley in 1986 for the International Congress of Mathematicians, and stayed on as visiting professor. Voiculescu was appointed professor at Berkeley in 1987.

He received the 2004 NAS Award in Mathematics from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for “the theory of free probability, in particular, using random matrices and a new concept of entropy to solve several hitherto intractable problems in von Neumann algebras.”

Voiculescu was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.