Edward Frenkel

Edward Vladimirovich Frenkel (; born May 2, 1968) is a Russian-American mathematician working in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Early life and education Edward Frenkel was born on May 2, 1968, in Kolomna, Russia, which was then part of the Soviet Union. His father is of Jewish descent and his mother is Russian. As a high school student he studied higher mathematics privately with Evgeny Evgenievich Petrov, although his initial interest was in quantum physics rather than mathematics. He was not admitted to Moscow State University due to antisemitism in Soviet Russia and instead enrolled in the applied mathematics program at the Gubkin University of Oil and Gas. While a student there, he attended the seminar of Israel Gelfand and worked with Boris Feigin and Dmitry Fuchs.

In 1989, upon receiving his undergraduate degree, he was invited to Harvard University and spent a year there as a visiting scholar. In 1990, he enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991 after one year of study under the direction of Boris Feigin and Joseph Bernstein. Among his other awards are Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (1995) and Chaire d'Excellence from .

In 2013, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, for "contributions to representation theory, conformal field theory, affine Lie algebras, and quantum field theory".

In 2014, Frenkel was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In a review published in The New York Review of Books, Jim Holt called Love and Math a "winsome new memoir" which is "three things: a Platonic love letter to mathematics; an attempt to give the layman some idea of its most magnificent drama-in-progress; and an autobiographical account, by turns inspiring and droll, of how the author himself came to be a leading player in that drama.”

The New York Times review called the book "powerful, passionate and inspiring."

Keith Devlin wrote in The Huffington Post: "With every page, I found my mind's eye conjuring up a fictional image of the book's author, writing by candlelight in the depths of the Siberian winter like Omar Sharif's Doctor Zhivago in the David Lean movie adaptation of Pasternak's famous novel. Love and Math is Edward Frenkel's Lara poems... As is true for all the great Russian novels, you will find in Frenkel's tale that one person's individual story of love and overcoming adversity provides both a penetrating lens on society and a revealing mirror into the human mind."

Peter Woit, author of Not Even Wrong, wrote in a blog post: