Hillel Furstenberg

Hillel Furstenberg, known as Harry, is a German-born American-Israeli mathematician, born in 1935, and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His family escaped Nazi Germany for the United States in 1939. He studied at Yeshiva University, took his doctorate at Princeton University under Salomon Bochner in 1958, taught at the University of Minnesota and moved to the Hebrew University in 1965. He is known for applying probability theory and ergodic theory to number theory and Lie groups. As an undergraduate in 1955 he gave a topological proof that there are infinitely many primes. In 1977 he recast Szemeredi theorem in ergodic terms and proved it that way, and his work on random walks on groups led to what is now called the Furstenberg boundary. He received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics and, in 2020, the Abel Prize together with Gregory Margulis.