Abstract
Enumerative geometers and their colleagues in representation theory and mathematical physics are very excited about the new perspectives on old and new problems offered by the nascent field of 3-dimensional mirror symmetry. While most formulations or explanations of what 3-dimensional mirror symmetry is require a lot of prerequisites and a high level of abstraction, some of its core predictions can be easily cast in the language that people like P.L. Chebyshev, C.G. Jacobi, and I.G. Macdonald would have no problem grasping. This is what I will try to do in this talk, which I hope will be accessible to the general mathematical audience.
Biography
Professor Andrei Okounkov, born in Moscow, Russia, is a world-renowned mathematician, who works on representation theory and its applications to algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, probability theory and special functions.
He obtained his PhD from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1995, under the supervision of Alexandre Kirillov. Since then he held professorships at world-leading academic institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. He is now Samuel Eilenberg Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University.
Professor Okounkov is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2012), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and was elected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2023.
Professor Okounkov received many important prizes including European Mathematical Society Prize (2004), and the Fields Medal (2006). He is a ICM Plenary speaker in 2018.