Efim Zelmanov

Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov is a Russian American mathematician, born in Khabarovsk on 7 September 1955, known for his work on combinatorial problems in nonassociative algebra and group theory, including his solution of the restricted Burnside problem. He entered Novosibirsk State University in 1972, obtained a doctoral degree there in 1980 and a higher degree at Leningrad State University in 1985, and left the Soviet Union in 1987. He was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich in 1994. His early work was on Jordan algebras in the infinite dimensional case, and he showed that the Engel identity for Lie algebras implies nilpotence in the infinite dimensional case. He became a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2001, the youngest member of its mathematics section, and in 2022 moved to the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.