David Kazhdan
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David Kazhdan (spelled דוד קשדן in Hebrew, Každan or Kajdan in translations of some of his earlier papers, formerly named Дми́трий Александрович Каждан (Dmitri Aleksandrovich Kazhdan) until he left Russia) is an Israeli mathematician known for work in representation theory.
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[edit] Life
The son of Alexander Kazhdan, he was born in 1946 in Moscow, USSR. He earned a doctorate under Alexandre Kirillov in 1969 and was a leading member of Israel Gelfand's school of mathematics. He is Jewish, and emigrated from the Soviet Union to take a position at Harvard University in 1975. He changed his official names, from Dmitri Aleksandrovich to David, and became an Orthodox Jew, also around that time.
In 2005 he immigrated to Israel and is now a professor both at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Harvard.
[edit] Research
He is known for many fertile collaborations: with Israel Gelfand, Victor Kac, George Lusztig (on an influential Kazhdan-Lusztig conjecture on Verma modules), with Grigory Margulis (Kazhdan-Margulis theorem), with Yuval Flicker and S. J. Patterson on the representations of metaplectic groups. Kazhdan's property (T) is now a much-studied aspect of representation theory.
Kazhdan held a MacArthur Fellowship from 1990 to 1995. One of his students was Vladimir Voevodsky, a recipient of the Fields Medal, a prize for young mathematicians of outstanding reputation.
[edit] Family
His son, Eli Kazhdan, was director general of Natan Sharansky's Yisrael BaAliyah political party (now merged with Likud). A second son, Michael Kazhdan, is a professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. His youngest son, Daniel Kazhdan, is a PhD student in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. His daughter, Dina Kazhdan, is a social worker in Israel.
