| Igor Frenkel | |
| Birth Date: | 22 April 1952 |
| Birth Place: | Leningrad, Soviet Union (present-day Russia) |
| Citizenship: | American |
| Nationality: | Russian |
| Field: | Mathematics |
| Work Institutions: | Yale University |
| Alma Mater: | Saint Petersburg State University Yale University |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Howard Garland |
| Doctoral Students: | Pavel Etingof Mikhail Khovanov Alexander Kirillov, Jr. |
Igor Borisovich Frenkel (Russian: Игорь Борисович Френкель; born April 22, 1952) is a Russian-American mathematician at Yale University working in representation theory and mathematical physics.
Frenkel emigrated to the United States in 1979. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1980 with a dissertation on the "Orbital Theory for Affine Lie Algebras". He held positions at the IAS and MSRI, and a tenured professorship at Rutgers University, before taking his current job of tenured professor at Yale University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018.[1] He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[2]
In collaboration with James Lepowsky and Arne Meurman, he constructed the monster vertex algebra, a vertex algebra which provides a representation of the monster group.[3] [4]
Around 1990, as a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Frenkel worked on the mathematical theory of knots, hoping to develop a theory in which the knot would be seen as a physical object. He continued to develop the idea with his student Mikhail Khovanov, and their collaboration ultimately led to the discovery of Khovanov homology, a refinement of the Jones polynomial, in 2002.
A detailed description of Igor Frenkel's research over the years can be found in Web site: Perspectives in Representation Theory .