Efim Zelmanov

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Efim Isakovich Zelmanov)

This article does not cite any references or sources. (September 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov (Ефим Исаакович Зельманов: born September 7 1955) is a mathematician, known for his work on combinatorial problems in nonassociative algebra and group theory, including his solution of the restricted Burnside problem. He was awarded a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich in 1994.

Zelmanov was born into a Jewish family in Khabarovsk, Soviet Union (now in Russia). He took a doctoral degree at Novosibirsk State University, and a higher degree at Leningrad State University in 1985. He had a position in Novosibirsk until 1987, when he left the Soviet Union. He has two children, Boris Badnetov and Natasha Zelmanov.

In 1990 he moved to the United States, becoming a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was at the University of Chicago in 1994/5, then at Yale University. As of 2002, he is a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

Zelmanov's early work was on Jordan algebras in the case of infinite dimensions. He was able to show that Glennie's identity in a certain sense generates all identities that hold. He then showed that the Engel identity for Lie algebras implies nilpotence, in the case of infinite dimensions.