Alexander Beilinson

Alexander Beilinson, born in 1957, is a mathematician who holds the David and Mary Winton Green University professorship at the University of Chicago. Born in Moscow, he was refused entry to Moscow State University because of his Jewish surname, studied first at the Pedagogical Institute and later transferred to Moscow State University as a third-year student. His research has spanned representation theory, algebraic geometry and mathematical physics. In 1981 he announced, with Joseph Bernstein, a proof of the Kazhdan-Lusztig and Jantzen conjectures, whose method of localization describes representations of a Lie algebra through D-modules on the flag variety. In 1982 he formulated conjectures on motivic cohomology, now called the Beilinson-Soule conjectures, and in 1984 he published his work on higher regulators and values of L-functions. From the early 1990s he worked with Vladimir Drinfeld on chiral algebras and the theory of vertex algebras. His honours include the Ostrowski Prize in 1999, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017, the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2018 and the Shaw Prize in Mathematics in 2020.