Boris Zilber (, born 1949) is a Soviet-British mathematician who works in

mathematical logic Mathematical logic is the study of Logic#Formal logic, formal logic within mathematics. Major subareas include model theory, proof theory, set theory, and recursion theory (also known as computability theory). Research in mathematical logic com ...

, specifically

model theory In mathematical logic, model theory is the study of the relationship between theory (mathematical logic), formal theories (a collection of Sentence (mathematical logic), sentences in a formal language expressing statements about a Structure (mat ...

. He is a emeritus professor of mathematical logic at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

. He obtained his doctorate (

Candidate of Sciences A Candidate of Sciences is a Doctor of Philosophy, PhD-equivalent academic research degree in all the post-Soviet countries with the exception of Ukraine, and until the 1990s it was also awarded in Central and Eastern European countries. It is ...

) from the Novosibirsk State University in 1975 under the supervision of Mikhail Taitslin and his habilitation (

Doctor of Sciences A Doctor of Sciences, abbreviated д-р наук or д. н.; ; ; ; is a higher doctoral degree in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and many Commonwealth of Independent States countries. One of the prerequisites of receiving a Doctor of Sciences ...

) from the

Saint Petersburg State University Saint Petersburg State University (SPBGU; ) is a public research university in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Russia. Founded in 1724 by a decree of Peter the Great, the university from the be ...

in 1986. Zilber received the

Senior Berwick Prize The Berwick Prize and Senior Berwick Prize are two prizes of the London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Stat ...

(2004) and the Pólya Prize (2015) from the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh ...

. He also gave the

Tarski Lectures The Alfred Tarski Lectures are an annual distinction in mathematical logic and series of lectures held at the University of California, Berkeley. Established in tribute to Alfred Tarski on the fifth anniversary of his death, the award has been give ...

in 2002.

Research

Zilber is well known for his seminal work around several fundamental problems in mathematics, mostly in the broad area of geometric

. In particular, his trichotomy conjecture on the nature of strongly minimal sets has been extremely influential in geometric stability theory. Although it is false in full generality (refuted by Ehud Hrushovski), it holds in many important settings, e.g. Zariski geometries, and has been successfully applied to several problems including the Mordell-Lang conjecture for function fields. Zilber's work on model theory of complex exponentiation led him to propose several influential conjectures including the Quasiminimality conjecture,. the Existential Closedness conjecture,. and the Conjecture on Intersections with Tori.

References

External links

Prof. Zilber's homepage
20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Living people Academics of the University of Oxford Model theorists Soviet mathematicians Russian mathematicians Scientists from Tashkent Novosibirsk State University alumni 1949 births Fellows of Merton College, Oxford {{UK-mathematician-stub

Research

See also

References

External links