__NOTOC__ Igor Rivin (born 1961 in

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

) is a Russian-Canadian mathematician, working in various fields of pure and applied mathematics, computer science, and materials science. He was the Regius Professor of Mathematics at the

University of St. Andrews The University of St Andrews (, ; abbreviated as St And in post-nominals) is a public university in St Andrews, Scotland. It is the oldest of the four ancient universities of Scotland and, following the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, t ...

from 2015 to 2017, and was the chief research officer at Cryptos Fund until 2019. He was the principal of a couple of small hedge funds, and later did research for Edgestream LP, in addition to his academic work.

Career

He received his B.Sc. (Hon) in mathematics from the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

in 1981, and his Ph.D. in 1986 from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

under the direction of

William Thurston William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. Thurst ...

. Following his doctorate, Rivin directed development of QLISP and the

Mathematica Wolfram (previously known as Mathematica and Wolfram Mathematica) is a software system with built-in libraries for several areas of technical computing that allows machine learning, statistics, symbolic computation, data manipulation, network ...

kernel, before returning to academia in 1992, where he held positions at the

Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques The Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS; English: Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies) is a French research institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics (also with a small theoretical biology g ...

, the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Ein ...

, the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

Warwick Warwick ( ) is a market town, civil parish and the county town of Warwickshire in the Warwick District in England, adjacent to the River Avon, Warwickshire, River Avon. It is south of Coventry, and south-east of Birmingham. It is adjoined wit ...

, and

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private university, private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small g ...

. Since 1999, Rivin has been professor of mathematics at

Temple University Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related research university in Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist ministe ...

. Between 2015 and 2017 he was Regius Professor of Mathematics at the

Major accomplishments

Rivin's PhD thesis and a series of extensions characterized hyperbolic 3-dimensional

polyhedra In geometry, a polyhedron (: polyhedra or polyhedrons; ) is a three-dimensional figure with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices. The term "polyhedron" may refer either to a solid figure or to its boundary su ...

in terms of their dihedral angles, resolving a long-standing open question of

Jakob Steiner Jakob Steiner (18 March 1796 – 1 April 1863) was a Swiss mathematician who worked primarily in geometry. Life Steiner was born in the village of Utzenstorf, Canton of Bern. At 18, he became a pupil of Heinrich Pestalozzi and afterwards st ...

on the inscribable combinatorial types. These, and some related results in convex geometry, have been used in 3-manifold topology, theoretical physics, computational geometry, and the recently developed field of

discrete differential geometry Discrete differential geometry is the study of discrete counterparts of notions in differential geometry. Instead of smooth curves and surfaces, there are polygons, meshes, and simplicial complexes. It is used in the study of computer graphics ...

. Rivin has also made advances in counting geodesics on surfaces, the study of generic elements of discrete subgroups of Lie groups, and in the theory of dynamical systems. Rivin is also active in applied areas, having written large parts of the

2.0 kernel, and he developed a database of hypothetical zeolites in collaboration with M. M. J. Treacy. Rivin is a frequent contributor to

MathOverflow MathOverflow is a mathematics question-and-answer (Q&A) website, which serves as an online community of mathematicians. It allows users to ask questions, submit answers, and rate both, all while getting merit points for their activities. It is ...

. Igor Rivin is the co-creator, with economist Carlo Scevola, of Cryptocurrencies Index 30 (CCi30), an index of the top 30

cryptocurrencies A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership records ...

weighted by

market capitalization Market capitalization, sometimes referred to as market cap, is the total value of a publicly traded company's outstanding common shares owned by stockholders. Market capitalization is equal to the market price per common share multiplied by ...

. CCi30 is sometimes used by academic economists as a market index when comparing the cryptocurrency trading market as a whole with individual currencies.

Honors

* First prize, Canadian Mathematical Olympiad, 1977 *

Whitehead prize The Whitehead Prize is awarded yearly by the London Mathematical Society to multiple mathematicians working in the United Kingdom who are at an early stage of their career. The prize is named in memory of homotopy theory pioneer J. H. C. Whitehe ...

of the London Mathematical Society, 1998 * Advanced Research Fellowship of the EPSRC, 1998 *

Lady Davis Fellowship The Lady Davis Fellow is a program of The Lady Davis Foundation for the scholars to carry out research in various areas on the campuses of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Israel. The Lady Da ...

at the Hebrew University, 2006 * Berlin Mathematical School professorship, 2011. * Fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

, 2014.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2014-12-17

References

External links

Igor Rivin's Google Scholar profile

Igor Rivin at Math Overflow
*
Cryptocurrencies Index 30
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rivin, Igor Canadian mathematicians Jewish American scientists University of Toronto alumni Geometers 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Living people 1961 births Fellows of the American Mathematical Society 21st-century American Jews