| Harry Fürstenberg | |
|---|---|
Hillel Fürstenberg in 1992
(photo by George Bergman) |
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| Born | September 29, 1935 Berlin |
| Nationality | American Israeli |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Salomon Bochner |
| Doctoral students | Alexander Lubotzky Vitaly Bergelson |
| Known for | proof of Szemerédi's theorem Fürstenberg compactification |
| Notable awards | Israel Prize Harvey Prize Wolf Prize |
Hillel (Harry) Fürstenberg (Hebrew: הלל (הארי) פורסטנברג) (born September 29, 1935) is an American-Israeli mathematician, a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a laureate of the Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He is known for his application of probability theory and ergodic theory methods to other areas of mathematics, including number theory and Lie groups. He gained attention at an early stage in his career for producing an innovative topological proof of the infinitude of prime numbers. He proved unique ergodicity of horocycle flows on a compact hyperbolic Riemann surfaces in the early 1970s. In 1977, he gave an ergodic theory reformulation, and subsequently proof, of Szemerédi's theorem. The Fürstenberg boundary and Fürstenberg compactification of a locally symmetric space are named after him.
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Hillel Fürstenberg was born in Germany, in 1935, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In the Yeshiva University he concluded his BA and MSc studies in 1955. He obtained his Ph. D. under Salomon Bochner at Princeton University in 1958. After several years at the University of Minnesota he became a Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1965.