Joseph Bernstein

Joseph Bernstein, sometimes spelled I. N. Bernshtein, is a Soviet-born Israeli mathematician working at Tel Aviv University, born on 18 April 1945, who works in algebraic geometry, representation theory and number theory. He received his Ph.D. in 1972 under Israel Gelfand at Moscow State University and emigrated to the United States in 1981 because of growing antisemitism in the Soviet Union. He was a professor at Harvard from 1983 to 1993 and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1985 to 1986 and again in 1997 to 1998. In 1993 he moved to Israel to take a professorship at Tel Aviv University, where he has been emeritus since 2014. He received a gold medal at the 1962 International Mathematical Olympiad, was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2002 and the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2004, received the Israel Prize for mathematics in 2004 and was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2026.