Vladimir Drinfeld was born into a Jewish mathematical family, in Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union in 1954.
10 Facts About Vladimir Drinfeld
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In 1969, at the age of 15, Vladimir Drinfeld represented the Soviet Union at the International Mathematics Olympiad in Bucharest, Romania, and won a gold medal with the full score of 40 points.
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Vladimir Drinfeld was, at the time, the youngest participant to achieve a perfect score, a record that has since been surpassed by only four others including Sergei Konyagin and Noam Elkies.
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Vladimir Drinfeld entered Moscow State University in the same year and graduated from it in 1974.
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Vladimir Drinfeld was awarded the Candidate of Sciences degree in 1978 and the Doctor of Sciences degree from the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in 1988.
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Vladimir Drinfeld moved to the United States in 1999 and has been working at the University of Chicago since January 1999.
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In 1974, at the age of twenty, Vladimir Drinfeld announced a proof of the Langlands conjectures for GL2 over a global field of positive characteristic.
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Later, in 1983, Vladimir Drinfeld published a short article that expanded the scope of the Langlands conjectures.
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Vladimir Drinfeld pointed out that instead of automorphic forms one can consider automorphic perverse sheaves or automorphic D-modules.
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Vladimir Drinfeld has collaborated with Alexander Beilinson to rebuild the theory of vertex algebras in a coordinate-free form, which have become increasingly important to two-dimensional conformal field theory, string theory, and the geometric Langlands program.