Efim Zelmanov - Biography

Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov (Ефи́м Исаа́кович Зе́льманов; born 7 September 1955) is a Russian 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, Russia. He obtained doctoral degree at Novosibirsk State University in 1980, and a higher degree at Leningrad State University in 1985. He had a position in Novosibirsk until 1987, when he left the Soviet Union.

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.

External links

• The Work of Efim Zelmanov (Fields Medal 1994) by Kapil Hari Paranjape.