Tsachik Gelander

Tsachik Gelander is an Israeli mathematician working in the fields of Lie groups, topological groups, symmetric spaces, rigidity, lattices and discrete subgroups (of Lie groups as well as general locally compact groups). He was a professor of mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 2006 until 2013, and has been at the Weizmann Institute of Science from 2013, and at Northwestern University from 2022.

Gelander earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2003, under the supervision of Shahar Mozes. His doctoral dissertation, Counting Manifolds and Tits Alternative, won the Haim Nessyahu Prize in Mathematics, awarded by the Israel Mathematical Union for the best annual doctoral dissertation in mathematics. After holding a Gibbs Assistant Professorship at Yale University, and faculty positions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Gelander joined Northwestern where he is currently a professor of mathematics. Among his well-known results is the solution to the Goldman conjecture, i.e. that the action of on the deformation variety of a compact Lie group is ergodic when is at least .

He gave the distinguished Nachdiplom Lectures at ETH Zurich in 2011, and was an invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians, giving a talk under the title of Asymptotic Invariants of Locally Symmetric Spaces. He was one of the recipients of the first call of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2007), and in 2021 he won the ERC Advanced Grant.

Selected publications