Yakov Matveevich Eliashberg (also Yasha Eliashberg; Russian: Яков Матвеевич Элиашберг; born 11 December 1946) is an American mathematician who was born in Leningrad, USSR.
Education and career
Eliashberg received his PhD, entitled Surgery of Singularities of Smooth Mappings, from Leningrad University in 1972, under the direction of Vladimir Rokhlin.[1]
Due to the growing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, from 1972 to 1979 he had to work at the Syktyvkar State University in the isolated Komi Republic. In 1980 Eliashberg returned to Leningrad and applied for a visa, but his request was denied and he became a refusenik until 1987. He was cut off from mathematical life and was prevented to work in academia, but due to a friend's intercession, he managed to secure a job in industry as the head of a computer software group.[2][3][4]
In 1988 Eliashberg managed to move to the United States, and since 1989 he has been Herald L. and Caroline L. Ritch professor of mathematics at Stanford University.[5] Between 2001 and 2002 he was Distinguished Visiting professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies.[6]
In 2013 Eliashberg shared with Helmut Hofer the Heinz Hopf Prize from the ETH, Zurich, for their pioneering research in symplectic topology.[20] In 2016 Yakov Eliashberg was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Swedish Academy of Sciencesfor the development of contact and symplectic topology and groundbreaking discoveries of rigidity and flexibility phenomena.[21]
In the 80's he developed a combinatorial technique[13] which he used to prove that the group of symplectomorphisms is -closed in the diffeomorphism group.[26] This fundamental result, proved also in a different way by Gromov,[27] is now called the Eliashberg-Gromov theorem, and is one of the first manifestation of symplectic rigidity.
Eliashberg classified contact structures into "tight" and "overtwisted" ones.[29] Using this dichotomy, he gave the complete classification of contact structures on the 3-sphere.[14] Together with Thurston, he developed the theory of confoliations, which unifies foliations and contact structures.[30]
Eliashberg worked on various aspects of the h-principle, introduced by Mikhail Gromov, and he wrote in 2002 an introductory book on the subject.[31]
Eliashberg, Yakov (24 January 1991). "Filling by holomorphic discs and its applications". Geometry of Low-Dimensional Manifolds. Cambridge University Press. pp. 45–68. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511629341.006. ISBN978-0-521-40001-5.
Eliashberg, Yakov (1990). "Topological Characterization of Stein Manifolds of Dimension >2". International Journal of Mathematics. 01 (1). World Scientific Pub Co Pte Lt: 29–46. doi:10.1142/s0129167x90000034. ISSN0129-167X.
Bourgeois, Frederic; Eliashberg, Yakov; Hofer, Helmut; Wysocki, Kris; Zehnder, Eduard (4 December 2003). "Compactness results in Symplectic Field Theory". Geometry & Topology. 7 (2). Mathematical Sciences Publishers: 799–888. arXiv:math/0308183. doi:10.2140/gt.2003.7.799. ISSN1364-0380. S2CID11794561.
Books
Eliashberg, Yakov M.; Thurston, William P. Confoliations. University Lecture Series, 13. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 1998. x+66 pp. ISBN0-8218-0776-5
Eliashberg, Y.; Mishachev, N. Introduction to the h-principle. Graduate Studies in Mathematics, 48. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2002. xviii+206 pp. ISBN0-8218-3227-1
Cieliebak, Kai; Eliashberg, Yakov. From Stein to Weinstein and back. Symplectic geometry of affine complex manifolds. American Mathematical Society Colloquium Publications, 59. American Mathematical Society, Providence, RI, 2012. xii+364 pp. ISBN978-0-8218-8533-8
^ abEliashberg, Ya M. (1986). "Combinatorial methods in symplectic geometry". Proc. of the International Congress of Mathematicians, 1986. pp. 531–539.