15 Facts About Yakov Eliashberg

Yakov Matveevich Eliashberg is an American mathematician who was born in Leningrad, USSR.

In 1980 Yakov Eliashberg returned to Leningrad and applied for a visa, but his request was denied and he became a refusenik until 1987.

Yakov Eliashberg was cut off from mathematical life and was prevented to work in academia, but due to a friend's intercession, he managed to secure a job in industry as the head of a computer software group.

In 1988 Eliashberg managed to move to the United States, and since 1989 he has been Herald L and Caroline L Ritch professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

Yakov Eliashberg received the "Young Mathematician" Prize from the Leningrad Mathematical Society in 1972.

Yakov Eliashberg was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986,1998 and 2006.

In 2001 Yakov Eliashberg was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry from the AMS for his work in symplectic and contact topology, in particular for his proof of the symplectic rigidity and the development of 3-dimensional contact topology.

In 2002 Yakov Eliashberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences of the US and in 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Yakov Eliashberg was a member of the Selection Committee in mathematical sciences of the Shaw Prize.

Yakov Eliashberg received a Doctorat Honoris Causa from the ENS Lyon in 2009 and from the University of Uppsala in 2017.

In 2013 Yakov Eliashberg shared with Helmut Hofer the Heinz Hopf Prize from the ETH, Zurich, for their pioneering research in symplectic topology.

In 2016 Yakov Eliashberg was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Swedish Academy of Sciences for the development of contact and symplectic topology and groundbreaking discoveries of rigidity and flexibility phenomena.

Yakov Eliashberg was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

Yakov Eliashberg worked on various aspects of the h-principle, introduced by Mikhail Gromov, and he wrote in 2002 an introductory book on the subject.

Together with Givental and Hofer, Yakov Eliashberg pioneered the foundations of symplectic field theory.