Yakov Eliashberg

Yakov Matveevich Eliashberg, born on 11 December 1946 in Leningrad, is an American mathematician who holds the Herald L. and Caroline L. Ritch professorship of mathematics at Stanford University. His research is in differential topology, above all symplectic and contact topology. He received his doctorate from Leningrad University in 1972 under Vladimir Rokhlin, worked at Syktyvkar State University until 1979, was a refusenik from 1980 to 1987, and moved to the United States in 1988. His results include the proof that the group of symplectomorphisms is closed in the diffeomorphism group, now called the Eliashberg-Gromov theorem, a topological characterisation of Stein manifolds of high dimension, and the division of contact structures into tight and overtwisted ones, which gave the classification of contact structures on the 3-sphere. He pioneered symplectic field theory with Givental and Hofer and wrote a book on the h-principle. He won the Veblen Prize in Geometry in 2001 and the Wolf Prize in 2020, shared with Simon Donaldson, and has supervised 43 doctoral students, among them Emmy Murphy.