Maxim Kontsevich

Maxim Lvovich Kontsevich is a Russian and French mathematician and mathematical physicist, born on 25 August 1964, who is a professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques and a distinguished professor at the University of Miami. He left Moscow State University without a degree in 1985, sketched a proof of the Witten conjecture at the Arbeitstagung in Bonn, and received his Dr. rer. nat. at the University of Bonn in 1992 under Don Bernard Zagier. His work concentrates on geometric aspects of mathematical physics, most notably on knot theory, quantization and mirror symmetry; he found a formal deformation quantization that holds for any Poisson manifold and introduced the Kontsevich integral, a topological invariant of knots. He received the Henri Poincaré Prize in 1997, the Fields Medal in 1998, the Crafoord Prize in 2008, the Shaw Prize and Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2012 and the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2015.